Skateboarding: The Endless Sidewalk
We are sitting in a large linoleum hall in which Samsonite folding chairs have been arranged as pews. Sitting on all sides are young people of both sexes: they are pre, barely post and flat-out stone pubescent. The majority of them are cradling skateboards in their laps.
The occasion is the first Corte Madera, California, screening of Jon Malvino’s skateboard film, That Magic Feeling. Skateboard movies are of a type. You can expect spectacular stunts accompanied by an unsynced soundtrack of original music, undistinguished for the most part and marked by constant drumming, equally persistent rhythm guitar and occasional lead guitar runs that one supposes are meant to be soaring. Surfing music, it is called. The films themselves feature thin, suntanned young people of both sexes balancing on boards with wheels on the bottom, and moving rapidly in every conceivable direction.
The lights go out, the titles appear on the screen. Here’s a young man in shorts skating toward the camera.
“Yeah, get it, all right, get down, do it,” the audience suggests in shrill cacophony. “Yeahhhhhh.”
There are no signs, but it is definitely wrong to smoke. Unhealthy. Not clean … old. The odor of bubble gum is overpowering.
Up front, in the honor row, sit some of the stars of the film: older skaters, veterans, some as old as 18. They are blond, tan and healthy. Their complexions are clear. Three of them are sharing a joint. When any of the locals appear on the screen, the younger members of the audience clap and cheer and laugh loudly in recognition.
The movie shows people skating down steep blacktopped hills in lonely sections of Northern California. It shows people in empty backyard swimming pools, the kidney-shaped ones. The skaters starting at the shallow end push a few times off the bottom of the pool, work up speed and shoot down the incline to the deep end. They throw their weight toward the sky and ride the deep-end wall way up toward the tiles at the top, where it says eight feet. This feat takes perhaps two seconds in its entirety, and it is cheered wildly by the audience. The object, quite clearly, is to ride the two inches of blue tile at the top, while avoiding the lip of the pool. When a skater hits the lip, he invariably loses his board and must run down the steeply sloping side of the pool. This often results in skinned knees and elbows. Sometimes a skater simply plummets to the bottom of the pool and strikes his head on the bottom, producing a muffled gonglike sound called a bongo. Bongos often result in periods of unconsciousness, during which other skaters gather around the fallen comrade and ask if he is all right until he regains his senses.
The pool-riding sequences are some of the most popular in the film. The moves are graceful, dangerous and thrilling to watch. A nonskater could conceivably complain that they go on a touch too long, but that is to miss the point of the film. Everyone here tonight — with a few old, overweight parental exceptions — is a skater. The film is a celebration of the cult, of the sport. There is a sense of being special here. The danger is part of it, the grace is part of it, the exclusivity is part of it. Those who haven’t mastered the moves are clearly studying them. Tomorrow there will be a concentrated search for empty pools. On the screen, the pool riders take rim shot after rim shot. One feels that they have been doing this since dawn and will continue until sunset.
Other shots show young skaters making their stealthy way into dry reservoirs and drainage ditches. The audience cheers the trespass as much as the subsequent skating sequence. The ditches with their sloped sides and gradual inclines provide good, fast, gutsy rides. Never mind the chain-link fences. Skaters are above the law. Moves are studied. Younger members of the audience succeed in identifying the location of one of the ditches. Tomorrow that ditch will be filled with young skaters from dawn until sunset.
Cut to a panorama shot of San Francisco: A young man is rocketing down the steep residential streets of Russian Hill. To slow his speed, he cuts into every other driveway. Pedestrians stare in awe. The audience laughs, cheers and stamps on the floor.
Downtown San Francisco. An office building with a curious architectural conceit. The building erupts out of the concrete in a gentle curving wave, perhaps four feet high. Here comes a shirtless skater, taking the building-based wave to the top, then dropping back to the horizontal. He cuts, pushes with one foot and takes the wave again. Another skater takes the wave. The camera pans to a uniformed security guard who regards the skaters with sour amusement. Perhaps the guard has yelled something and has gone unheeded, for the next shot shows him to be angry. The skaters skate their wave and the surfing music crashes and sprays against the eardrums. Now we see a fat man — old, maybe even 40 — whose face is curled up in a mask of ugly anger.
“Ohhhhhhhh,” the audience remarks in unison.
The angry old fat man — he has a cigarette in his mouth — yells something. The young graceful skaters circle him, just out of reach, like gadflies. One of them miscalculates his turn. He falls. The board continues a few yards, and the fat man grabs it.
The audience rises up in indignation. Not his skateboard. No. Booo. Fat. Clumsy. No.
The fat man has the board under his arm and he is rolling up his sleeves. He has white, pasty arms with muscles like Popeye. And here comes the second skater, fast, fast, a lightning bolt of justice, moving toward the fat man’s back. The fat man whirls and we miss the action behind a something-out-of-focus, a sculpture perhaps. But now the second skater emerges, the captured skateboard under his arm. The fat man kicks, misses. The skaters are out of reach, and the audience is jumping up and down on their seats and yelling and screaming and cheering. It is reminiscent of those audiences who cheered Froggy the Gremlin in the old TV show. On the screen is a last, lingering shot of the slow old man: fat and vanquished and ludicrous in his anger.
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