Wheels Up and Higher
1980
Valley of the sun. Howard’s Bowl, Pink Sink, Lizards, Dead Cat and Dead Kitten. Push, pump, push, pump, hiss, clatter clatter clatter, hiss. Each time it’s my turn I come alive and abandon hesitation. I push. I attack. My wheels and body reach the top of the 11 foot deep, kidney shaped pool in the backyard of a Scottsdale Ranch beauty, one of Valley Real Estate’s hot market cold sales. Trespass, sweep and bucket out the last several inches and let the sun bake out the last wet spots. And then, we attack. I attack. I carve. I ride that Atomic Wheeled, Tracker Trucked, Ray Rodriguez vehicle up higher and higher until I can go no more — the wheels gliding over the tile at the top of the pool. “I think that was an edger!” my skater friend yells from the shade of the roof overhang above the deep end of the pool. He sees the lip of the Atomic wheel hanging on to the top of the coping, above the tile, no further to go…He sees it in a millisecond of forever, where my push gets me higher to the point of departure.
Randy chops out the lines with a business card, on the desk in my bedroom, between geometry with Mr. Bennet and weight training with Coach Keller. My day gets better, brighter, and I experience hope where none existed before. I feel my body lift out of itself. Don’t ask me about the acute feeling of dread as the speed leaves my synapses. Just don’t ask.
And at the ramp in Scott’s backyard we take turns, his mom in a wheelchair, permanently sitting and watching from the window in the Mojave school neighborhood that abuts Chaparral Park. We take turns, Dave, Scott, Greg, Jody and I, each pushing furiously for speed, ascending the ramp and lifting the front wheels up and over and back, a “kick turn,” where I sometimes grab a rail and lift the board off the ramp, at the peak of the turn, and hastily rehearse for an aerial. I’m bored with it, uninspired, another Arizona day escaping my house, my dad’s wrath only a few blocks away. And then it happens, I’m in the air, out of control, laid back and aligned in flight with the verticality of the ramp, in the air and above the top of the ramp, maybe two inches above. Flying.
Another day, another school break, another friend sprinkles something on the loaded bowl of the bong I cradle in my hands and I suck it down. And while I found my answer in the nose hits between 3rd and 4th period, geometry and weight training, here I find my soul — beyond words, beyond the corporeal experience of my still growing body, right after lunch period, before Environmental Science.
Greg picks me up in the early Saturday morning, well before anyone is awake at my house, especially my dad — which feels like averting disaster. We drive in his little white pickup and listen to a completely new and correct tape cassette in the truck — where the music takes me somewhere novel and hope filled. A band called The Cars? — now who the fuck is this? We drive out of the valley into the uni-horizoned desert, graced with the occasional stand-alone industrial building, the rocky sand flats peopled with the Saguaro, the prickly pear, the sage, and my eye gouging, fear inducing favorite, the Agave. Off the road into the rosy decomposed granite road bed, driving further out and out and there. Yes, there on the approaching horizon they sit like square bars uniformly spaced, their blue white brightness contrasted against the warm, neutral tan of the ground where they sit. Eight, Ten and Twelve foot pipes, monstrous concrete sections, cast smooth as glass, with no visible aggregate or flaws. And I jump up into the twelve footer, orient myself and board and fakie my way side to side, compressing my knees each time, pushing off the vertical surface with a squat each time, building speed and climbing until my kick turns take me easily past the vertical at six feet and I go further. I rock and roll my way up like a baby in a cradle until it becomes a physical impossibility for me to go any higher. My wheels are clacking and cess sliding because to lift them off at that well-past-vertical will put me in the air and out of touch with the safety of wheels on concrete, of centripetal gravity — the force that allows me to get ever higher…
“Are you ready?” the combat medic asks as he leans over me sitting with arm outstretched, efficiently tied off with a medical grade, velcro fastened tourniquet… The needle penetrates the bulge on my arm , the plunge quick and thick into my vein. The overbearing heft of my body melts into the ground. My brother in arms, in my arm, and again I find my soul. Only this time, it’s not just a higher experience or an answer, the drug is my salvation from the weight of the world.
