Are you familiar with how one day can follow another? Have you noticed how a high can be given its cruddy yang at what you would call an unseemly moment? I have lived this life and am here to report from my position doing the backstroke in a mud puddle.
Perhaps you read the entry before this and know that Saturday was a boon of:
embarrassment at my half-pipe skills (which really culminated when I dropped in in front of one of the people who had never seen me skate and she said, in the most surprised way: YAY!!! the same way you would say it if a tiny child stood up and then landed back on its diapered butt)
Cats plus skunks
WOMEN RIDING SKATEBOARDS
Lining my interior with Vietnamese spring rolls as though I were an empty duffel bag headed for window display.
I awoke Sunday morning with my daily desire to get my house together. I distilled that feeling into a single mission, which was delivering a small box of Indy trucks to a dude in Fullerton. I drove them down from San Francisco for a friend, along with a Honda-load of my personal items, to my new home in Highland Park, Los Angeles. I have no idea what is near or far in the greater Los Angeles area so I will drive anywhere and not think much of it. If you were like “Let’s go to Long Beach and then later can you drop me in Ojai?” I would say, “NO PROBLEM.”
So I trot on down to Fullerton, which seems like a model home for the rest of L.A. I didn’t see anything that distinguished it from every other town down here which is hot, full of palm trees, kids on razor scooters, a billion plastic bags on the wind, broken styrofoam cups in tree planters (seriously, a message to anyone with eco-panic in San Francisco or Portland: maybe take your hand off the Serial Mom button and know what you are doing is good, but not yet widespread. I knew this girl who never wanted to drive when we were all headed for a destination that required driving because it made her feel eco-better to not burn her personal gas. So someone else always drove and she felt exonerated. It made me feel like STOP BEING SUCH A DUMB HONKY.) (Are you ready, white people? Are you ready to become a boutique race of artisans with tiny fingers that raises exquisite heirloom cucumbers?) (This vision excludes the working class and a few others).
I arrive at a small warehouse space where I hand over the trucks. There is no thank you or other gesture indicating gratitude, so I assume we are already communicating psychically. Cool, I wish there was more of that. I indicate that I would like to go skate and it turns out the two dudes with whom I am in this space intend to do the same. I say, “I would very much like to skate bowls as I spent yesterday on a swing set and having no flow.” They say, “Yeah we can do that.” Me: “Cool.”
We get in the van of one of them. We drive to the Fullerton skatepark. It is like if the ladybug ride at Disneyland got old and laid on a flat rock in the direct sun for a decade then sort of popped up as a skatepark. There are some fun hips and pockets and it is just a flow bowl with sticks and cigarette butts in it. Plus exclusively dudes skating. I am accustomed to this scenario and in my three years have skated with the most fun, awesome dudes a person could ever skate with. So okay. I skate the park for 45 minutes while my associates do the same. I find out we are waiting for some people then we are going to skate another place which has bowls. The people arrive. We are instead going to a backyarder in the local hills.
The reason I know we’re leaving the Fullerton skatepark is everyone I’m with climbs over the fence and starts walking to the car. No one told me, but that’s cool. Why do people need to talk so much anyway? I get to the van and sit in the front passenger seat. I have that feeling of disconnect that happens when hanging out with people who I don’t really know and who don’t really talk to me but I’m invited to be there. I don’t know how to talk to them either because I don’t know our common ground and I feel really female in an environment that is very much not. If I may be so bold as to go Mars and Venus in my description.
Guy in back of van: You guys gotta see a picture of this hot chick Steve is banging. She has giant tits.
Other guy: Is that why he hasn’t been hanging out?
Guy: Totally dude, they’re like fucking all the time. Dude if I were going to open a strip club I would have the hallway on the way to the bathroom lined with girls behind glass like in Amsterdam. There would be red lights and they would dance.
I think: But how would you monetize that? They can’t just work for free.
No one says anything. I suspect this is because I am there.
Guy: Dude why are you guys letting me talk, I’m so fucking stoned. Hey can we stop for beer?
But his ID does not match the name on his debit card so we have to go to one bodega for the ATM and then go to a different one for booze. You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. They achieve beer.
We drive up a winding road lined with hot pink Bougainvillea, Agaves attenuata and scrubbly California plants. It looks like we are driving through a documentary about a skater from the 80’s. We get up to a house where some guy has been building an alleged backyard bowl. He’s in his 40’s, lives with his grandparents, and they let him do this marvelous thing (or they don’t hear well and never walk to a window). We park in a nest of Hondas and trucks and walk around to the back of the house. There is a 3-sided concrete area with steep tranny, banks, walls, gaps, tile and noping. It looks like the kind of thing I would have to play around with to get used to it, but there is already a bunch of dudes shredding it while a couple guys photo and video. There is no way I’m getting in there. I would have to huff so much paint to feel at one with my environment. The sun is blazing and browning, and there is a small tent to which a truck has backed up. The gate to the truck bed is open and it’s filled with bags of concrete. A couple guys sit on the back. Another guy grills a meat of indeterminate origin. Other guys crowd under the tent in lawn chairs, watching the guys skate. I smile at a couple people and say hi and no one says a word, which feels freakish. All the chairs are taken. I stand in the sun and feel my cells quiver and shrink with heat. After 40 minutes a guy gets up and I take his seat.
I ask to be driven to my car three times. I use my telephone to assess that my car is nine miles away. Super long walk and quick drive. My ride, an adult man over forty, does not want to take me because one of his riders is trying to land an insane backside air over a gap and he needs to drive him home. I suspect the kid can get a ride from someone else but I don’t feel like I have any negotiating power here. I sit in the sun for another hour. Finally the trick is landed and we get ready to go. The rider doesn’t need a ride, he’s getting one from someone else.
The ride back to my car is awkward and quiet and I feel so gross and annoyed that I didn’t bring my own car and enable myself to leave when I wanted. I wish I had been able to skate many more hours that day and am bummed I sat in that uncomfortable environment and I wish I had the skills to jump in a session like that and feel awesome. But I do not. I have always felt super welcome at any session, regardless if the riders are way more skilled than me. This is the first time I’ve felt genuinely alienated. I kind of don’t want to blame the people there, because I feel like if I had chosen to get in and skate, it would have been fine and I would have been treated fine and the guys would have interacted with me more. I like that skate culture is so full of socially bizarre humans who don’t conduct themselves in a particularly user-friendly way. No one was hostile to me. There are certain strains of decorum that conduct human respect and dignity, and other strains that seem to simply facilitate a sort of babysitting of presumed emotional experience. This experience felt gross for a lot of reasons but at this moment I don’t feel like anything about it was unjust or wrong. The shit I brought to the table is my own. It was shaped by sexism in some capacities for sure, but I am an adult woman and I feel like I get to use that however I want.