Blog 10 - Personal Essay

Beads of sweat slithered down my face as I tried to remember the steps to this convoluted waltz. I’ve danced this dance before…a million times actually. Almost everything in life resembles a dance when you think about it. Doing homework is like participating in ballet. Reading a magazine is kind of like tap-dancing. Surfing the internet is reminiscent of the rumba and paying your taxes can be compared to doing the salsa with a partner who constantly steps on your feet deliberately. Everything in life is a dance of some sort. For the millionth time in a week, I danced the dance of skateboarding. Furthermore, I was dancing with two left feet today.

I can feel the beads of sweat from nearly half a decade ago trying to break free from the scenery of my skin and race down the sides of my cheeks towards my chin. They’re trying to break free not because of how much effort I have been putting into my skating or because of how long I’ve been skating, but because of the fact that it was just really, really hot outside. We got to the skate spot, Roselle Park High School, and sat down for a bit. This is before driver’s licenses and Roselle Park wasn’t exactly right around the corner from where we lived. I got off my board and walked to the top of the five stairs that composed the staircase that led to entrance of the building. I rolled around for a moment in the wide corridor that one had to walk through to get to the front doors of the school. The ground was nice and smooth; the nicest and the smoothest I had ever ridden on; at that point in my skate career anyway. I stopped playing around, looked out towards the street, and watched as a few cars drove by. Then, my eyes slowly tiptoed towards the stairs.
There are cases where you look back at a set of stairs you just climbed and you can’t actually see the stairs. It’s like looking over the edge of a cliff and all you see is the ground below and a few yards away from the final step touching the floor. All I saw was a tree that seemed to be setting like half of the sun dipping below the horizon line. I thought to myself as Brett and Manny skated around the driveway of the school. I was thinking about all the wrong things. I thought about what might happen if I didn’t land the trick correctly or what might happen if I tried to flee from my board while I was airborne. I visualized the end of a Thanksgiving meal where you and a family member or friend grabbed the opposite legs of a wishbone, tore it in half, and saw who got the bigger piece. However, instead of a wishbone being torn in two, it was my legs going in opposite directions if one foot decided to stay on the board and the back foot decided not to tag along. Suddenly, my mind went blank. I stopped pacing around in my head and on the smooth concrete with my board. I looked out over the horizon and went for the trick.

I stopped being so pessimistic about the situation and thought about how flying off of a two stair wouldn’t kill me. Secondly, I had a right foot and a left foot… not two left feet. I’ve danced this dance a million times. I got on my board and advanced towards the stairs. Brett and Jon watched as I approached the two foot drop and stopped what they had been doing. My feet shuffled on the grip tape of my board in preparation of executing an ollie; the most basic trick in skateboarding. My back foot slammed on the back of my board while the front foot lingered forward to even things out. My eyes crept ahead of my position and all I could see was the hood of and SUV.
I ejected in midair as the SUV drove past me and stopped at the drive-thru ATM machine of Unity Bank. I landed on my feet in less than a millisecond from the time of evacuation. My board had flown to the right and landed on the lawn beside the stairs. The impact of a two set, well, this two set, is really insignificant. I say this two set because of the fact that there are staircases with two steps somewhere out in the world in which one of the steps is six feet tall. That means doing a trick off of something twelve feet tall. Any trick, be it an ollie (which is basically you “jumping” in the air with the board still “stuck” to your feet) or a three sixty flip in which the skateboard rotates a full three hundred and sixty degrees before you land back on it, is difficult. Not only is the object twelve feet tall, but you not only have to deal with the height of the steps, but the distance of them as well.
But enough of the boring stuff. When you do the math, doing an ollie off of a two step shouldn’t have been such a big problem. But I guess we all have to start somewhere, right?

I landed perfectly on the board and rolled away without a problem. I looked over my shoulder at the five stair of Roselle Park High and laughed at it. Not aloud, mind you…because that would have just been really weird. I got off my board and ran back up the stairs to try them again. Manny decided to take pictures with my camera and Brett decided to sit on the stairs while I tried them. This was only semi-distracting. There was a handrail that divided the stairs in two; a left side of the rail, and a right side. I was trying the right side and Brett was pretty much leaning against the rail; on the right side. He didn’t occupy anymore than ten percent of the right side with his sitting there so I went for the trick anyway and landed it again.
On my way back to the top of the stairs, Brett grabbed a newspaper from a stack of tied up Sunday Star Ledger’s that had been sitting on the steps. He flipped it open and decided to move closer to the center of where I had been soaring over on my skateboard for the last thirty minutes. He kept saying how cool it would look if I did the set while he was reading the paper.

We all have to start somewhere. My thing was this: there are tons of things you can skate and be good at. Whether it’s grinding handrails, flying over gaps and huge chasms, grinding ledges, skating skate parks, doing what Tony Hawk does, and so on and so forth. Why did I need to be good at skating staircases? Brett varial flipped the two-stepped staircase right after Jon had kickflipped it. A varial flip involves the board spinning one hundred and eighty degrees underneath you while a kickflip is where the board does somewhat of a barrel roll beneath you. I was sort of in awe at all the stuff they could do on it compared to what I could; nothing at all. I ran back up the stairs in about a millisecond and thought about the mathematics and arithmetic behind it. There wasn’t much to it. Pop and land. That’s all there was to it. I rolled up towards the stairs and tried again. I ended up throwing it away and not committing to it. All I thought about was how I could die on it or break something like my wrist or my face if something went wrong. I thought about dancing with two left feet.

Nothing went wrong. While I was soaring over Brett and his Sunday paper, I managed to catch a glimpse of the Family Circus before impact; that’s one of the funniest comic strips in the universe. I rolled into the semi-circled driveway of Roselle Park High and thought about how school the next day was going to suck. Not because I didn’t like school, I did, but because I would probably spend the whole day doodling skateboards and drawing staircases with a million steps on them and me flying down them in my notebook. A million stairs is a lot of stairs so I would probably end up using two notebooks, maybe even three. I looked back at the set of stairs and wondered if there were any good coupons in the Star Ledger.

I could tell that Jon and Brett thought I sucked at this thing. Then again, they also knew that they had put more man hours into skateboarding than I did. I was a geek who never missed a day of school at that point and loved computers, martial arts and drawing. I was not cut out for sports. I also wasn’t cut out for sitting behind a computer screen all day while the world outside passed me by.
I got back to the top of the stairs and thought about how many other things I could be perfecting with my skating other than staircases. I could be practicing grinds or rolling around in pools right now. But there were no empty swimming pools to use as concrete waves and tear asunder. Right now, at that moment, there was a flight of stairs a toddler could hop up backwards with out a problem laughing. I thought about how my failure stemmed from lack of commitment and not some sort of allergic reaction to stairs at Unity Banks across the state of New Jersey, because, at the end of the day, allergies is the only excuse not to be able to do something. And even then I would be able to find a two stair somewhere else. I put my board on the ground and rolled towards the horizon.
I did my ollie and thought only about the ollie. Not about gashes in foreheads or missing kneecaps, but about the now. I thought about how in forty years I could say to myself that I actually stuck to it and didn’t abandon ship in midair. I thought about how my shoes were untied and looked kind of like thin strands of spaghetti being thrown at a food fight in a school lunch room. I thought about how I landed all four wheels on the ground as I rolled away from the two stairs.
Brett and Jon applauded my accomplishment. To some, it would have seemed like a minor accomplishment at best, but to those who know what it’s like to start at the bottom and work your way up it was like a breath of fresh air. I picked up my board and did the staircase with two steps again and again and again and again. After about thirty minutes of back-to-back ollies down it, I got tired of dancing. I understood the choreography and was committed to executing it confidently. I looked back at the stairs and took off my dance shoes.