All right, another Venice Story. As usual, I swear that everything in here is true, to the best of my recollection. This is one of my favorites:
Nowadays, it seems like they’ve always been there, but there was a time when you didn’t see any roller skates in Venice. In the early 70s, a friend of Cheryl, let’s call him Ted, lived in Venice. She met him when he was trying to get straightened out after his rich lawyer father kicked him out of the house after finding out that Ted was gay. Ted was a short guy, not very rugged. but he was funny and open to new things.
One day, he and his latest flame decided to roller skate down the Venice boardwalk. Two years later, Ted told me about that day.
“We just wanted to go roller skating, you know. I thought it would be cool, like when I was a kid. I still had a pair of those old metal skates; you know, the kind you open up with a key, a skate key. So I slipped them on over my tennis shoes, pushed them together on my toes and heels, and tightened them with the key. Bill didn’t have any skates, so he had to trot along beside me.” Ted had a wispy little mustache, and eyebrows to match. Sometimes I wondered why he didn’t have eyes where his upper lip was. “Cheryl, you know… I’m not very good at sports. So Bill, he just sort of pushed me along in front of him. I’d coast for a bit, then he’d catch up and push me again. We cruised all the way from Rose to Venice Boulevard. I tried turning there, to go down the biker path, see if I could skate along it. But I fell off the edge of the path, and hit the sand. I kinda stopped cold and hit my shin. One skate came right off, but the other one got jammed up somehow. I put the skate key in it, but it wouldn’t turn. I don’t know, either the key was bent or that little rod it goes in was stuck, or something, so I couldn’t get that skate off.
“Bill said I should just take by shoes off, and walk back home to get a pair of pliers, take it off that way. But we were right near Gold’s Gym, you know, the weightlifting place across Pacific. I told Bill, ‘Those guys are strong, maybe one of them will be able to get this skate off.’ I sort of pushed myself in there, gliding along on one skate, pushing with my other foot. I looked in and saw one of these really big guys sitting on a bench, all sweaty and naked, almost. So I took my shoe off and handed it to him. I said, ‘Mister, my skate key won’t work. Can you loosen up this skate for me?
“He took my shoe, and tried to turn that little knob the skate key goes on. He couldn’t even get his fingers around it, they were so big. So he just took the shoe, and ripped it out of the skate. He like tore to rubber off the sole, in front, so it was dangling and floppy when I put it back on. ‘There you go, kid. Now its fixed.’ Then he glared at me, so I said, ‘Thanks. Uh, can we stick around and watch you lift weights, or something?’.”
Cheryl looked from Ted over to me. She let out a high-pitched giggle, and said, through her laughing, “God, I can just see you Ted, walking into that gym, and going up and talking to one of those body-builders.”
“Yeah, I figured they could get my skate off, so I just went in. I’d never been in there before. It’s nothing but weights and mirrors! Those guys like to look at themselves all the time, especially when they lift weights. They like to see their muscles bulge out when they pick up those big barbells and things. And they grunt. It sounds like a men’s toilet, but without the smell.”
Ted was clearly an innovator, but just a little bit ahead of his time. The next year, someone developed urethane wheels, and put them on skate boards.
Back in the sixties, people skateboarded on those little metal wheels. The sport never quite caught on, because the axles didn’t swivel, and the rolling surface had no give, producing a harsh, unforgiving ride. Basically, just a roll – no tricks, no jumping, no wheelies, no banked flying turns. Then, urethane on axles which rotated around a central swivel point came along.
“It’s Southern California’s homage to the ultimate concretization of the world,” Tony said as he handed me his spare board. I was a skier, not a concrete surfer. But when you’re surrounded by 100 square miles of asphalt, and your month-long vacation might not come in winter, you take what you can get. I took the board.
We were in a mansion in Long Beach, owned by two sisters who ran a large chain of department stores – Bullock’s or something like that. This house was old money. Wainscoting five feet high and one foot thick. A banister which curled twice around itself at the bottom of a grand staircase. Antiques to put Vermont to shame. All with a 300 foot private beach out back. Tony’s Belgian wife Marie-Sylvie was their private accountant, and they’d asked her to house sit while they wintered in the south of France. I don’t think they knew about Tony.
Cheryl’s parents were close friends of his, and he came and went in her life while she was growing up. He was a polymath, working as a welder and a comic book artist. He’d learned to weld while serving time for a drug offense, and chronicled his life story in pictographs, mailed out to a widening circle of family and friends over the years. He’d turned their den into his workshop, where he drew and sculpted at the same time (naturally, he used his welding talents to produce salable artwork, advertised thru his comic book). Hopefully, the sisters wouldn’t come back before he could hide the smudges and burns on the floor’s oriental rug.
He took me out back, and threw his board down on the sidewalk next to the beach.
“You’re a skier, right, Al?” His curly long blond hair was ragged and greasy as he surveyed my slight form, wobbling painfully on the floppy board. Despite his fire plug build, he rode gracefully, seeming to hover with no movement above his ankles, knees bent across his angle of travel, arms spread out like a Tai Chi practitioner on a surf board. “Well, its pretty much the same thing, except you don’t get cold. Just try to let the board flow beneath you, and keep your hips directly above the center of travel.”
He flicked his knees down and up, shifted his weight back than front, and tip jumped the board up the curb. I was having trouble just pushing the thing with one foot while keeping the other planted on the board. Tony smiled, and told me a long story about a guy in prison who kept birds in his cell all winter, but lost them when they flew north come spring. “Guy’d promised everybody Rock Cornish hen for Easter, with fresh eggs. He was the one got egg on him, and not on his face! Haw!” He snorted and laughed, bowed his head and u-turned back towards the house.
When we got back inside, I asked, “Can you do this downhill, like skiing?”
“Uh, its more like surfing – You’ve got one foot in front of the other, and you have to balance with your hips, your hands, and your knees.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Skiing I understood. It was a warrior sport, I figured, because you kept both your eyes in front of you, like a hunting animal, an eagle or a tiger. Vegetative creatures, cows and canaries and such, have eyes looking out the side of their head, to give them a broader field of vision. I’m an inveterate hunter-biped, hooked on the grace and rhythm of sliding down snow on two boards, eyes front, upper body quiet, moving with just the feet. The idea of being unbalanced, and over a hard surface to boot, frightened me. But I was not yet 27, so still a child, and wanted to try something new.
“OK, but can you take it down hill, like skiing?”
“Well, I know some guys who go Sunday mornings over to the airport, and chute down the parking lot spirals. That’s a rush, I hear.”
“What about going up in the mountains, and riding down hill? Say, Mt. Pinos?”
“Hey, Frasier Park is a cool little town, there off the Grapevine. You thinking of taking this over there?”
“I like to get out into the mountains, or the beach, when I get a Sunday off, which only happens once a month. So, Cheryl and I were going up there tomorrow. Want to come?
You can show me how to take this thing downhill.”
“Hey, we’d love to, but we’ve got to get this place cleaned up. The sisters are coming back next week, and Marie would lose her job if it didn’t look immaculate. Be careful. You can get bad road rash falling off one of these things at 20 miles an hour. But I guess it’d be kinda cool to drive up, board down, and have Cheryl come and pick you up … heh heh, let’s hope that doesn’t literally happen, man! Here, you can take this board.” He handed me his custom ride. “It’s long and wide, real stable, like downhill skis maybe. It should do you ok as long as you don’t get going too fast. Just remember to ride low if you get scared; you don’t have so far to fall that way!”
(To be cont’d)
Al, I remember very well making those skateboards when I was a kid. We would find a piece of old board, take apart one of the skates, and after nailing both halves to the bottom of the board, we would head down the middle of the street with the nearest hills. We wore out a lot of skates in those days until, as you mentioned, we were able to replace the metal wheels with the newer, fancier, smoother riding versions.
One time we decided to get creative and took two wheels from a shopping cart that we had found. We put the swivel wheel on the front and the stationary wheel on the back. Then we headed to the nearest hill to try things out. I was first and immediately took off like a rocket. The only thing I could do was to attempt to remain vertical as I flew down that hill. I veered off up a driveway and onto the sidewalk in the hopes of slowing my rapidly gaining speed, which did help. I bounced over a curb and just kept rolling. What a rush for a young teenaged kid.
I spent most of my summers with scabbed over knees and chewed up toes.