Four wheels, trucks, strapped to a board= hours of fun. But my skateboards are collecting dust. I'm not sure if it was the drugs, the girls, beer, bands, or what, but they just sit there now. What a shame. Bored moments fulfilled by computers, and vice.
It was blue, and it was fast- my first board. Plastic Freeformer, loose ball-bearings, about four inches wide, twenty inches long. Got it from a garage sale.
Had to learn how to ride it. It was really pure. I met up with a kid named Dan and we would ride together. My mom owns a dancing studio, and we'd put stacks of 45's in a row and try to slalom. So it was just something that I always did. Then, in the 5th grade, got a wood Valterra for Christmas, and a copy of Thrasher. It was the coolest thing that I'd ever seen, and all the logos of the bands from the Sessions ads were immediately stenciled onto my board. I hadn't ever heard any of these bands, but that didn't strike me as very important at the time- I'd get around to it. So with my board acting like a list, I insisted on being dropped off at the Mall, and began collecting cassettes. It started off with the Ramones, onto the Misfits, DRI, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, and I ordered all the Skaterock volumes. Fuck yeah! A couple of years passed, and I moved onto better boards, and playing along to Black Flag on my drum set. I knew Cab was in the faction, Brian Brannon was in JFA and stuff, so putting 2 and 2 together, I had to start a band. It was called the Retards, and we knew how to play "TV Party", "Master of Puppets", and wrote two songs- "Isolation Zone", written by my cousin, and "Blue Balls". My cousin wrote the lyrics, and I wrote the music. So we fucked around in this kid Mark's garage- I sang and played the drums, Robby played bass, and Mark played the guitar. My cousin and I got a little bored with Mark's pussy attitude, and when he got a car, access to Mad Dog and pot(He was older and more mature than me), we spent our time getting loaded and going through drive thrus ordering Fucko Burgers and Cumshakes. Then, we would drive around waiting for people to wave us through at intersections, where we would proceed to flick the people off in tandem. We were so out of control! At this same time, I started skating with my friend Aaron. Speed and fun. Manuals, slappys, powerslides, and rock and rolls were the tricks, and we found every ditch, bank, and ramp in town. At the same time I built a ramp, and was amazed at the new friends I made. What amazed me most though, was that these kids came to skate, but stayed to smoke cigarettes. I loved the comraderie. These were my friends. My parents hated them all. That made me like them even more. We fought jocks together, stashed weapons and pot and booze at eachothers' houses, broke into baseball field conscession stands, and listened to punk rock. We began to realize that the cliche was true- we weren't like everybody else. We didn't want to be, and we didn't give a fuck. In tenth grade I transferred to public school, and began going to school with one of my old skatebuddies, Lee. He was one of those kids that did more hanging around with his board making everyone laugh, as opposed to skating. The jester of sorts. He introduced me to a kid named Eric, and we began skating together alot. Now my friend Dan, I still talk to him once a week, I see Lee every couple days, see Aaron once a week, Eric every day(He's the Cock Spaniels drummer), and I would talk to my cousin more, but he's insane. The fuckers I played basketball and stuff with? Who cares. They were never my friends, and that's why I was different. There wasn't anything wrong with me- I just didn't want to be an asskissing, cock-sucking asshole. We got fucked with by cops, jocks, and teachers, but we stuck together, and still do. And have been paying for it ever since. But I wouldn't have changed a thing. Not only did I skate, but I was proud of it. Skateboarding was still aligned with punk rock at the time. We started listening to alot of Mudhoney and Nirvana at the time, but those guys were all skaters and Black Flag fans. I also started realizing that there were kids like us all over the country. There were kids out there who thought the Dead Milkemen were brilliant. And the most inspiring thing was that we could hang out with those guys too, probably go skate, and share common ground with people from all over the country, if not the world. The "alternative" stuff, and even worse, the rap game had only just begun to seep into the culture. It was still underground, unaccepted, and DIY, a term I had just recently learned at the time, and applied to my first zines, and my band the Hot Young Rulers. We weren't nescessarily straight punk, but the spirit was there, and that was the important part. We loved the Butthole Surfers, and I began to realize that after all these years of doing this stuff, playing in bands and skateboarding, I was ready to die for it. So what did I do? I went away to college. What a dick, but it turned out to be a good move. In Kent, Ohio, I met some other skateboarders, and met up with a kid named Joe, who played me the Rip Offs, and Teengenerate. I forgot how fun punk rock could be, and this was the soundtrack to our days of skating. I was back in the hunt. I liked Kent, but during a drug binge, the walls of the dorms began closing in on me. I was shipped back to Youngstown with a head full of the Angry Samoans, and my Gonz deck with Indy 151's, Eric and I began working together at a restaurant with Lee, and skating all day, working, and drinking all night. During breaks in the skate action, we talked about starting a band. I willed E my drum set, and concentrated on my songwriting skills that I began with the Hot Young Rulers, and my guitar playing. He came along on the drums, and my girlfrien at the time, Dawn, learned how to play the bass. We all moved back to Kent, recruited my skating buddy Joe, and started the Cheatin' Hussies.
