As a kid from the age of eight to fourteen, I would go over to my best friend’s house usually every day. I couldn’t tell you if we bonded over the same things and that is why I became such great friends with him and his three year older brother or if it was because there grandparents house was two blocks away and there house could be seen from my house a block over. I remember the first day he moved in, I knew him since preschool and we were friends at our elementary school, but I was just bouncing on my trampoline watching a new family move into a house about fifty yards from my back yard. I didn’t really notice who it was until I saw the family come instead of the movers. I was ecstatic because I hardly ever left my house. He moved in over our school’s spring break and the next day he asked me to come over. I never, except for birthdays parties, left my house so I didn’t know proper etiquette to ask. Instead of asking how I should do this, I just went over there through my neighbors backyard which I got in trouble for. Then I went over to his house every day that break because his brother Wills had a skateboard as did I. We would just skate on his asphalt driveway pretty much all day unless we got tired or wanted to watch a skateboard video which in turn got us “pumped” up to skate. It was a viscous cycle that we got addicted to.
We would eventually encumber a few tools to our addiction. We got a piece of wood, either from a friend or their mom’s boyfriend who would aid us on our adventure into the extreme sports, and set it up on his mothers garden bricks to fly off of and nearly kill ourselves. We would try to nail any trick that we could possibly achieve which wasn’t much. We were still new to the sport and didn’t really know what to do. The basics were underway with ollies and spins. I always loved to do 180’s and shuv its which is when the board leaves your feet and does a 180 instead of you. Then from a friend who was older then us gave up his extreme sports nature, who lived down the block, gave us his round rail to grind. Every few months we started accumulating more and more skateboarding obstacles. We got a railroad I Beam to skate as well, my father made us a ramp for my birthday and Pat made them a quarter pipe. We had an arsenal so we decided to quickly use them at our disposal. The only other option we had after we could skate all these obstacles would be to mimic our idols. We watched skateboarding videos, we skated and now we had our own little spots that we and our family created us. We had to make our own movies and what better to call them, brutally honest “Amateur Videos.” I found my dad’s old school camcorder from the 80’s that was as big as a briefcase and weighed at least twenty five pounds. You could edit the video while recording. You got to add your own font, your own transitions could be added after every take and the beauty of it was that it recorded straight to VHS. I would bring this over on weekends when we could film from 11 in the morning till about 7 or 8 at night. One video captured just one day in our skating existence.
But Jon’s mother never really liked us doing these things because it was a liability for her. We were doing some pretty wreck-less abilities right out in front of her house and when we landed a trick we would ride out into the street that had minimum traffic but since it was a back road and our town didn’t have a police force at the time, people would usually go forty down the road. Also, Jon and Wills passed up all there responsibilities like cleaning the dishes, vacuuming and even getting the mail which we were right next to the entire time skating. Jon’s mom worked at the school that we went to and she was actually my third grade teacher.
When we filmed, we would do it in parts because you couldn’t edit the sequence of footage you captured on this behemoth of a video recorder so if it was your “part” you had to skate for about two hours at the top of your level. Skating is very unpredictable. Some days you have a trick, other days you can hardly ride. The night was coming in faster then we approached and we were time crunching our parts so we could get to Jon’s who was probably the most talented inline skater that was eleven years old. He was up but his mother came barging out the front door while he was going up for a grind, on camera and just started yelling at them for not getting the mail. I wish we still had the tapes because I remember looking up to her, I was directing at the time, while she was yelling. If we still had the tapes, which I think were lost for great purposes, you would be able to still see it. It was embarrassing because it always seemed like we were putting on a role when we skated like we were bad asses or something along those lines but in these “Amateur Videos”, in this moment you can still see we were still kids. We still laugh about it to this day but I got embarrassed for them because it’s only mail and there mom had a public fit over such a simple errand. But maybe it just boiled over after so many years.
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