For those who have asked if the picture of the skater in the pool is me: Yep, it is. I was a late blooming skate punk with the scars and bad knees to prove it. Sure, I had skated the old banana boards of the 70’s, but I usually broke them before I could really learn to skate. I guess it was better to break them instead of breaking myself. The most fun was attaching a rope to a bicycle and then letting somebody pull me around. I remember the Murfreesboro police didn’t like that very much, but it sure cut down the time it took to get to the game room where I’d blow ten dollars in about ten minutes on stupid video games. Dang that Donkey Kong! I’d always save a dollars worth of quarters for some pinball machine where I knew I could play for an hour or more on one quarter. But video games and pinball belong to a whole ‘nuther story. Skating was what it was all about from 1988 until 1992 for me. Any free time that wasn’t taken up by playing in a band was spent shredding street and ramp.
One day when I was bored in the fall of 1987 I bought an issue of Thrasher magazine. I liked their coverage of the skate punk music scene and the fashion. But it was the skating pictures that really moved me. Some high school kids worked with me at the pizza joint and they had just gotten boards. I used to borrow T-Bone’s “Gator” deck and tool around the parking lot. I was just flat riding and doing kick turns, but I knew I wanted my own deck. Turmoil followed turmoil at the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988, so it wasn’t until May of 1988 that I finally got a board. It was the classic Mark Gonzalez Vision one with the face graphics. Now I was ready to sprain my ankle and break my thumb over the next few years. I was also ready to have more fun then I’d ever had before.
The early days with the “Gonz” board were spent learning the basics. The first trick I mastered was a power slide. My Alva wheels were the best. Later when I was about done with skating full time I sold them and I wish I hadn’t. They could really snarl when going from full blast to skittering across the pavement as I tried to hang on. Next I was doing bomb drops which quickly led to the acid drop – and no, I’m not talking about drugs; an acid drop is when you ride off a tall ledge and just drop to the pavement like a rock. Next I learned the boneless although I never could master the one Markey Dave did where he would flip the board while in mid-air. There were 180’s and 360’s variations. I learned a trick out of Transworld called the step off shove it that always impressed others. You just take your lead foot off the board, plant it, and then shove the board around and as the board spins you jump back on before it hits the ground. It was a Mark Gonzalez trick. I learned how to do grinds, but I was still a nobody unless I learned how to do an ollie. I spent a lot of time that summer popping the tail of the board until I finally got the board to lift off the ground properly.
Once I could ollie I was ready to try anything. My friend, Toby Holmes, found a backyard half-pipe in his neighborhood so we just went right over and crashed the place. It was a six foot ramp and was fairly tight. Here I was, 21 years old, and I have to admit I was scared the first few times I tried to drop in. Eventually I got over my fear and I was able to just ride fakie up and down it. I liked the rail slide pipe that was set up in the driveway. I spent a few weekends trying to master sliding the length and also grinding the top. Rail slides soon became a Wally specialty. It turned out that the owner of the ramp was a Riverdale High School kid named Jeff Bailey who happened to know Markey Dave’s kid brother. He usually skated the ramp with Brian Hickman who would one day end up in my band Dragula. Jeff was a very good aggressive skater with his own redneck style wearing old overalls and a Co-Op baseball cap. Brian was originally from California and he was just total smoothness on the ramp with tricks none of us Tennessee boys had ever seen. He was very quiet in his ubiquitous Batman t-shirt. Soon I began meeting many of the local kids that seriously skated. There probably weren’t more than thirty or so back in 1988. Some of the best were middle school age – Hames, Jamie, and Lanny. Hames would later go on to design the skate park at the local YMCA. A few of the skaters around my age were Nelson, Craig, and the great Chuck.
Chuck was great because he had a four foot half pipe inside a shop at this house. So we could skate with any kind of weather. The half pipe had too much flat bottom, but it was still fun. I learned some regular ramp tricks there, but I never had enough courage to try them over at Jeff’s house. It didn’t hurt Chuck’s status that he often invited us into his house to watch skate videos, although I’m sure lots of the guys spent more time eying Chuck’s cute younger sister. We often used to sneak into the building when Chuck wasn’t around to skate the ramp. I don’t guess he would have cared. I quickly went through my first board and it was replaced by another “Gonz” board – this one with some of his awesome artwork. One of our skate rat buddies borrowed it one night at Chuck’s and tried to drop in on the four foot ramp, but it shot out from under him like a bullet. He ended up breaking his wrist as he fell and hit the ramp and the board ended up with its nose stuck in the wall. I broke my thumb later that year just dorking around the public square in Murfreesboro. I was doing ollies to nose bleeds on the Confederate soldier monument, no comply’s over parking blocks, and then on a simple boneless to block slide I smashed my thumb. The local hospital even missed the break when I first went in and it was a few days before I got a call saying they had caught the break. At least I knew why my thumb was still twice its size and purple.
Part two will follow on Friday January 21st detailing more skating adventures including a guide to the spots we skated.
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