Recently I started skateboarding again with my 8-year-old son, Henry. It is as criminally fun to me now as it was when, a few years older than him, I skated the bottle-strewn streets of 1970s Venice. I grew up in Dogtown, which is to skaters what Haight-Ashbury is to hippies. I have the funny walk, esoteric vocabulary, and occasionally paranoid attitude to prove it. Local gangs like the V-13 and the Crips scared the hell out of me, but Zephyr (as in Z-Boys) captivated me. I copied its cryptic logo obsessively in my school notebooks.
This second act of my skating life began two winters ago. As the radiators clanged away and our apartment grew more oppressive each cold week, Henry invited me to play a new video game called Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. All the swerving back and forth made me feel carsick. But it also reminded me, in the most intense way, of a time, back in Venice, when I loved skateboarding so much that I slept with my deck.
"You know, Henry," I said, watching a digital Bob Burnquist lay down 30-foot handrail grinds before ollieing a Dumpster and landing on a windowsill, "we could do that—I mean, get real skateboards."
"When?" he asked, suddenly attentive. The beady, fiendish look in his eyes was all too familiar. "Yes," I thought, "this is my own."
I had been waiting for that moment, I realize—the day when my dad repertoire would expand beyond playing Legos and giving piggyback rides and I would be able to initiate my son into my version of male mysteries. It had been 17 years since I last set foot on a deck. In that time, ESPN had invented the X-Games. Tony Hawk had gotten a Q rating. Louisville, Kentucky—of all places—had built a free 24-7 skate park with minimal safety requirements! And I hadn't once thought about skateboarding, except as a nostalgic token of my own misspent youth. Yet when the moment came, I knew there was nothing I wanted more than to grind pool copings with Henry.
Our first day out, a crisp March morning, we wore knit caps and parkas and flailed for balance on a Brooklyn street like drunken sailors. After one traumatic sideways thigh-flop (mine), I suggested sheepishly that we walk the boards to a cul-de-sac above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where I hoped I would be able to remember how to do what had come naturally when I was 10. Trying to look nonchalant as I limped down the street, I told myself that I was just a dad taking his son out for a little fresh air and exercise.
Why not baseball or soccer, something more seemly for an urban professional nearing 40? It's a truism that fathers force on their sons the passions of their childhood, either to regain a lost sense of youth or to live out their failed ambitions through their progeny. In the coming months, I would find myself guilty on both charges. But I would also watch in surprise as skateboarding made me a better parent—a stranger one, by some standards, but one that was a more accurate version of myself.
