Missoula News

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Tony Hawk Ain’t Got Nothin’ On Me

By Bob Wire, 7-16-07

I’ll let you in on a little secret. It may tarnish my image, but I’m a skateboarder.

I finally took the kids to Missoula’s Mobash skate park a few weeks ago, and reawakened the brash young carver within me, surfing the smooth concrete and performing gentle kick turns near the upper lip of the big bowl. If you watch the accompanying video, you’ll see that, while I’m no Tony Hawk, I still got some moves.

But I was much better in my youth, of course. Thirty years and 50 pounds ago, a fall would only bruise my pride. Now, when I fall, I feel like Hulk Hogan diving off the turnbuckle and landing on a pile of bowling balls. Every crash means a potential ride in the Life Flight chopper.

But getting back into skating has brought with it some memories, good and bad. The bad ones involve my high school sex life, or lack thereof.

You always remember the first time. My Big Moment occurred when I was 15, in a sleeping bag in the woods with the daughter of a Marine Corps Lt. Colonel who lived in our officers’ neighborhood. Word spread like a brush fire through high school the next day of my unlikely conquest, and for a short time I was revered as a 5’ 2” sex machine. But, as everyone eventually found out, there was some confusion in the dark confines of that sleeping bag, and I’d only managed to ravage her belly button.

The truth is, other than poor aim, the reason I never got laid in high school is on account of skateboarding.

See, my adolescence was straight out of “The Great Santini.” My father, a USMC pilot, considered my obsession with skateboarding to be akin to playing with a yo-yo, but from 1976 to 1978 or so, I was one of the best skaters in the Palm Springs area. While the infamous Z-Boys were re-inventing the sport in Santa Cruz, we were doing our part 150 miles inland, seeking out empty pools at abandoned desert motels. We formed a mail-order skateboard store (High Desert Surf Shop in 29 Palms) so we could get our gear wholesale, and for a while I was even sponsored by Sims (They gave me a couple of decks and a t-shirt).

But all the glory and excitement I enjoyed came at a huge price. As long as I insisted on riding a skateboard, I was forbidden to use the family car. As a junior and senior in high school, this was a major blow to my social life. In order to have sex, you had to have access to a car (and perhaps an abandoned desert motel). No car, no sex.

But once I started college, I put away the board and women started showing up almost immediately. Maybe Dad was right. (Although I did have a couple of dangerous episodes with that, too, involving a couple trips to the hospital. Okay, the clinic.)

But now I’m a middle-aged married guy, so sex is a thing of the past (although on the rare occasion I do get some action, I still wear a helmet). I’m able to use all my best moves in the skate park, though, and it gives me something that the kids and I can all enjoy doing together.

Before Mobash, I had taken Rusty and Speaker to the old YMCA skate park a few times, and watched them cruise around the wooden ramps and half-pipe. One morning, after hearing yet another boring story from my Desert Z-Boys days, Barb encouraged me to go downtown and outfit myself so I could join the kids. So I grabbed the checkbook and went to Elements, where I described my needs to Colby.

“You do any street skating?” he asked, trying to determine what kind of board to set up.

“Nah,” I told him. “I have a car.”

“Grind?”

“Auto-drip.”

“Ollies?”

“Who?”

He probably would have written me off, but I casually dropped a couple of names, and mentioned that I used to skate alongside Wally Inouye, who invented the fakie. That got a surprised look, and a little respect.

I told him I wasn’t into sliding down hand rails, jumping up curbs, or any of that ankle-breaking shit. I just wanted to go back and forth in the half-pipe until my calves begged to be taken out and shot. He set me up with a big, fat, wide deck that was twice the square footage of what we used to use. It was contoured and cupped, and had a generous kick tail on the back. Attached were some super-wide trucks and hard, rounded wheels with sealed bearings. I was amazed at how the equipment had advanced since our late 70’s heyday.

I bought all the pads and helmet (which cost more than the board), and returned to the ramps at the Y, where Rusty and Speaker were still rolling around. I tightened up the trucks a bit, donned my safety gear, and started pumping back and forth in the half-pipe, getting maybe halfway up before I took my first fall. I hit the surface hard enough to make the whole structure shudder, and a couple kids rolled over on their boards to see if I was okay.

“Hey, grandpa, you okay, dude?” said one of the little punks.

“Wow!” said the other one, “Where’d you get that old school board?”

Christ. Old School. More like Pre School. But I’d show those little bastards. I dusted myself off and started carving that half-pipe again, and soon enough the old feeling returned. I got my rhythm going, and was making clean turns at the top of the ramp, sometimes only a single wheel connecting me to the lip.

Aerials? Not bloody likely. For me, I’m content to skate within my own time warp, scoring the occasional coping grind and riding the bowls at Mobash to simply enjoy the speed and the rush, and the nostalgic memory of sex, and when it’s ever gonna happen.

[Barring any broken bones, Bob will be putting up fresh blogs every couple of days at www.NewWest.net/BobWire.]

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