Jojo crept up and slapped me on the neck last week, so I punched him in the face. I just turned around, balled up my fist, cocked back, and laid one on him square in the nose. I didn’t know what to do. It was the only thing to do. He stumbled back, clutching his nose with both hands, screaming. “You fuck!” he screamed, “You idiot!”
It turns out his move was just a joke, a joke that required him to yell out, “Redneck, you son-a-bitch!” But he must have forgotten the punchline. So I punched him in the face. I got a lot of shit for that one. The boys wouldn’t really talk to me for a couple of days. They’d all kind of just walk away when I would say hi to them. But still, they’d ask me to come along skateboarding with them like usual. Skateboarding is the only thing that keeps any of us from punching the rest of the world in the face. It’s funny how it works sometimes. Like how we can all be angry with the world while pushing around on our little wooden toys. I think about that a lot, but then again I think about many things a lot, like how I would just love it if everyone would stop being such an asshole. I mean I can’t take it, I really can’t. The way you can sit next to someone on the subway and just really sense their sneering thoughts about you, looking at you as if you were scum. And how there’s oil spills and the threat of nuclear war and racism and phony people. It makes me want to just not even try.
Brad and I were standing next to each other on top of the miniramp deck at the skatepark, watching an old forty-something seshing the ramp. He looked seasoned and serious and wore a worn helmet and big, scuffed-up knee pads. “This guy’s awesome,” Brad said, in response to a stylish invert the guy just did. “I hope I can be still shredding when I’m forty.”
“Yeah but this guy’s from a golden age of skateboarding, a time when there were like two big skate teams and skaters were skating without needing to be filmed or photographed,” I said in admonishment. “Now-a-days it’s just drive here, drive there, film some worked-up trick. And when you don’t get it, you get angry and stressed over it. I don’t remember that feeling when I was younger, it wasn’t like that at all. I had not concept of my image on a screen or photograph.”
“You think about it and you talk about it like it’s a horrible thing, dude.”
“That’s because it really is. And you know what? I think it’s too late for me.” I skated away, too angry to talk about it anymore. As I drove away to a clearing on a hill, the spot I’d always go to be by myself in the evenings, I breathed heavy breaths of fury. But by the time I arrived and got out of the car and sat on top of my hood, I had calmed to a starry-eyed human being as calm as the park I was at. I liked being by myself with only my own thoughts to keep me company. It’s like holding hands with the net that keeps me from falling.
That night I got drunk with some of my friends. We sat in a circle in a dark, dingy basement. Someone’s parents were out of town or something, probably getting away from their droning work-lives or going to a funeral or figuring out a way to just get away from it all, to be by themselves with their own thoughts. There were little rusty floor lamps all over, casting just tiny little glow-balls of yellow light through cigarette-burned lampshades. The floor was dirty from all the shoes that never get taken off. Something smelled like vomit, but only near a certain corner of the room. Friends would talk about weed and beer and rum and bitches and pussy and old friends. Some whining voice sang about some fantasy land of deserts and coughdrops over a descending chord progression. You could see faces space out or laugh through the milky holes of the heavy gray smoke coming out of people’s mouths. The shit that comes out of people’s mouths.
And so it goes.
