11 minute read
The Most Fun Thing — Personal Essay
by grass-fires
K.B
The Most Fun
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“I HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT I TAKE SKATEBOARDING TOO SERIOUSLY,” KYLE BEACHY WRITES IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS NEW BOOK, THE MOST FUN THING: DISPATCHES FROM A SKATEBOARD LIFE. THEN, IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH, AS IF TO PROVE THIS POINT, HE CONTINUES, “VIA A LONG SEQUENCE OF QUESTIONS OF SELFHOOD AND PERFORMANCE, ABOUT WATCHING AND COMPREHENDING, I HAVE COME TO THINK THAT THE STYLE SKATEBOARDERS SPEAK OF MIGHT, IN FACT, BE A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING WHAT MANKIND USED TO CALL THE SOUL.”
AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED BY HIS TONE AND VOCABULARY, KYLE BEACHY IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT A UNIVERSITY. NOW 41, BEACHY LIVES AND WORKS IN CHICAGO WITH HIS WIFE AND HAS BEEN SKATEBOARDING SINCE HE WAS A KID. HIS ANALYSIS OF SKATEBOARDING— AS A SUBCULTURE TURNED WORLDWIDE CULTURAL COMMODITY—IS BOTH POETIC AND DEEPLY ANALYTICAL. HIS BOOK TAKES THE FORM OF A SERIES OF ESSAYS, SOME OF WHICH HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE, AND WHICH ARE BEST READ IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. BEACHY ANALYSES NYJAH HUSTON’S SKATEBOARDING ALONGSIDE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S WRITING ALONGSIDE HIS OWN EXPERIENCES AS A SKATEBOARDER, ULTIMATELY PRESENTING A NEW AND UNIQUELY ACADEMIC VOICE IN SKATEBOARDING. BEACHY IS UNASHAMEDLY DEDICATED TO UNCOVERING SKATEBOARDING’S COMPLEXITIES, WRITING ABOUT OUR SUBCULTURE IN WAYS WE’VE RARELY SEEN BEFORE, WHICH IS REFRESHING. THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM THE FIRST CHAPTER OF KYLE BEACHY’S BOOK, WHICH IS AVAILABLE THROUGH GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING.
—NAT KASSEL
Thing.
Illustrations — Brett Randall
FOR WHOM IS THE FUN THING FUN?
On a sunny afternoon in the middle of a global pandemic, I go out for a long, solitary walk through Blue Line Chicago. To live in a city is to find oneself constantly choosing among modes of transportation. For most of the seventeen years I’ve lived here, when I’ve walked it’s been from my home to the train, from the train to my destination. But these are days of working from a shared in-home office, my wife’s desk and my own facing each other so that our two offset monitors create a partition. In the evenings, we walk the neighborhood together like retirees. Alone, I construct full outings around slow, single tasks. I pass the bars and stores along Milwaukee Avenue, all shuttered and the parking spots empty. Today the sun is high and the sky very clear. I make it to the park and sit for a time with a book, watch some dogs, then decide to get to my errand. which are of two sorts: The first are inquiries into the upcoming Nike SB quickstrike drop on Friday, for which there is a raffle with very rigid entry guidelines. These calls have become standard for shops like Uprise, which serve as temporary holding cells for these footwear commodities that arrive with great hype, sell out immediately, and go straight to resale websites.
I backtrack, peel off, and wind behind a row of storefronts—you can cross Chicago entirely through alleys if you like. This one is beneath the tracks. I press fingers into my ears to muffle the sound of an inbound train and stand before the open rear door of Uprise. I can see inside through a locked scissor gate, so I holler to my two friends working up front, Paul and G. After some discussion, G lets me in. We move through one of two inventory rooms, past shelves filled with row upon row of turquoise Nike SB boxes (the other room, behind the abutting storefront Uprise expanded into in 2016, is devoted entirely to red and cardboard–colored Vans stock). The front room, the show floor, has been turned into a shipping and receiving station full of outgoing orders, tape guns, and packing slips. The lights are off but the sun through the windows is plenty. Still, despite having no customers, an old skateboard video is playing on the TV mounted up near the ceiling. The second sort of call would seem tied to the current pandemic. Parents, you see, are growing desperate for new ways to entertain their children at home. So, G slowly and patiently explains what he’d otherwise hold, show, and compare side by side. A skateboard is built from a wooden deck, two trucks that serve as suspension, and four wheels, each of which spins upon two sets of ball bearings. A pack of bolts and nuts holds it all together, and a sheet of griptape is filed and razor cut to fit the board’s shape.
“Boards are all about thirty-two inches long, unless you get a mini. How old is your kid?” I am tickled to hear G adopting professional patience. “They go from about seven and a half inches to eight and a half or nine, for a standard popsicle. Or we’ve got bigger shaped decks, like the old-school decks from the eighties? Yeah, like reissues.”
Fun The shop is closed and I shouldn’t be in here. But they’re bored with this new mode of business and I’ve gone weeks without a fix, so we risk it, respecting one another’s distance. I lean against the glass case of wheels and we catch up about Paul’s art, G’s side hustles, my writing. I do what I’ve always done in skate shops, moving along the racks of hanging clothes. I pick a thing and hold it, put it back, then lean over the glass case and examine the wheels. G asks about my wife. She likes G, likes pressing him on his lifestyle and vernacular and casual offhand comments. Then, G takes one of several phone calls that come during the fifteen minutes I’ll spend here,
Soon, I will leave carrying my own new deck and a sheet of grip rolled into a tube. At home, I’ll tear away the cellophane and peel off the warning sticker: Skate within your abilities. Injury or death may result from improper use. Wear safety gear. Follow traffic/pedestrian safety rules. I’ll hear my wife on a work call in the office, unroll the grip and remove its paper to expose the adhesive, then lay and press it carefully onto the deck so that a sliver, a tiny slice, of the board’s nose (its front) remains uncovered. This blip of revealed wood grain will mean that I won’t have to think about which direction is forward. I cannot stress enough how important this last step is, ensuring a future occasion when I’ll not have to think. But for now, I linger a few minutes longer. The video up on the screen is an old one, not quite a classic but one I’ve watched four or five times. Would that I could pull a G here, and speak in clear, professional terms to communicate the ways these videos matter. Unlike music and sports, skateboarding has little use for live-action events attended by fans. Its media is the message—between magazines and these videos lives a culture that rejects official rules while rest-
ing upon a rich latticework of values, authored and archived by this same media. Precedent is established only to be challenged and warped by each successive new release. These videos are portals to worlds askew, and I can still recall the way my first exposure left me dizzy with possibilities for movement, appearance, and attitude—possibilities for being. As objects, the best of them are rich with tonal shifts and allusion and homage, working within and pushing against established forms like the most exciting works of art. And how fun they are to watch, how visceral at times, like little grenades of spectacle that explode with affect.
I’ve been lucky in these thirty-some years of skateboarding to have always had a good shop nearby, and Uprise is the best of them by far. I could list these shops in the order they matter, could sketch their layouts as sure as I could describe old familiar routes to school or family seating arrangements at the dinner table. Two days ago, I chipped my current board by throwing it against a wall during a minor, half-serious tantrum. It was stupid and childish, and I regretted it immediately, but not enough to keep skating on a chipped board. I am a forty-oneyear-old man with a steady income for whom skateboarding continues to fill a necessary if difficult-to-name void. So, while I protest the discount G gives me at the register and make a show of wanting to support the business during this tough economy, I eventually relent. I accept his discount just as I accept the boxes of boards and other hardware, the shoes and apparel that have on occasion appeared on my doorstep—with absolute glee. Because in truth, there is no other thing I know will bring me joy like having somehow earned my way into these small but divine returns.
Thing
In August 2011, I wrote an e-mail to the editors of a start-up online sports magazine called The Classical. I introduced myself as a professor of literature and creative writing with one novel published and a second in progress. If you want to know skateboarding, I told them, look at a skater’s elbows. Examine their shins. It was a plea rooted in the authenticity to which my own scarred elbows and shins did attest. I wanted, I told them, to be their new skateboarding columnist.
As soon as I sent it, I felt ridiculous. I was no journalist. Anything I’d written about skateboarding had been either private, fictional draft work or a casual blog post. I had a brand-new, fulltime, tenure-track teaching job that came with institutional expectations for a completed and published novel, soon. But I felt there was something pressing in the young decade, apropos the activity, industry, and culture of skateboarding. A former professional skater–turned–actor had transformed an old LA warehouse into a content factory. Street League Skateboarding was on the rise as an ESPN centerpiece, with real-time scoring, winner-take-all finals, and, like, jumbotrons. Odd Future’s usurpation of skateboarding’s aesthetic reversed skateboarding’s own pirating of backpack rap in the early nineties, a move that proved lifesaving at a time when skate culture was at its absolute ugliest. There was emergent streetwear hoopla, Supreme and Palace, and the looming specter of the Olympics.
It was a state of strange, lawless transition, and of course, a geologic disruption of media—new phones, Instagram, and a suddenly overwhelming daily torrent of skateboard content.
Since the mid-1980s, skateboarding has been well ahead of the broader cultural curve with Thing regard to lifestyle documentation. The full-length videos that emerged concurrent with the proliferation of handheld home video cameras became, by the early nineties, the world’s best access to an era of radical invention. These VHS tapes were between a half and a full hour long and divvied into sections devoted to individual skaters, which we called parts. A part presents a song’s length of footage, compiled over months and years in different urban locations and arranged into a sequence of single maneuvers and lines of tricks strung together. There were also montage segments and, though they are rare today, a so-called slam section made from clips of the most terrible and injurious failures. And always, as interstitial material or brief surfacings from the depths, some element of hijinks—mayhem inside the tour van or pranks at the hotel, objects thrown from balconies. Sometimes scripted, sometimes not, these provided a kind of lingua franca for skaters dispersed across the country. They made humans—if flat and incomplete ones—of our legends, gave voice and character to the skaters whose photos were taped to our walls and to the companies whose exactly similar products we’d choose between at the shop— they created, in a word, branding.
By 2011, it was fairly clear that these films, the time and budgets required to produce and distribute them, were incompatible with emergent technological, distributive, and consumptive trends. They were being challenged by the release of individual parts, which we’d continue to call “parts” even when there was no whole from which they’d come, and they’d be challenged next by the widespread and scattershot broadcasting of even shorter clips, sometimes of single tricks looped into infinite, sacralized repetition via social networks. The stories were breaking down, the statues showing cracks, and the conversation was demanding new tools, new approaches.
What I did not mention in that first e-mail were the questions I had. What was the grip, really, that this practice had on me? Skateboarding was not good for my career or dating life. At times, I’d stand in the hot shower watching grime and blood circle at my feet and think, Wouldn’t it be pleasant to not be so tender? To not always have a wrist or ankle or knee ache? To not ruin a new work shirt by knocking loose an elbow scab against a lectern? To discuss any of this with others like me could only go so far—what might one skater say to another about this most obvious thing? We tended to nod knowingly and retreat, grateful for the strange embrace of our baffling hobby. I guess I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more. I wanted meaning. And, while all of the six decades since skateboarding’s invention have seen change—growth, retraction, trends in tricks and terrain and the fits of our pants—it would be difficult to argue now, peering back after the end of the 2010s, that any decade saw more significant change in the ways that skateboarding means.
