What’s so damn hot about skateboarders?

Underneath a section of an I-95 overpass that cuts through Philadelphia’s south side is the FDR Skate Park. With features like the “Bunker Wall” and “Amoeba” area, it’s what a number of influential skate magazines have dubbed a skateboarder’s paradise. In 2007, Tony Hawk immortalized FDR by making it virtually skateable in his video game proving ground. For me, someone who managed to do one (1) flip jump mount in eighth grade and then quit, FDR was my promised land of milk and honey when the milk skatered and the honey dreamed Brothers were filming each other wiping off.

What’s so damn hot about skateboarders? Which made me want to watch Victor Rasuk and Emile Hirsch do it Lords of Dogtown keep making out with girls in adjoining beds and imagining a young nikki reed telling them never to wear underwear around me? What makes me joke, “My husband rides there” every time a skateboarder whizzes past me in SoHo? Trying to pinpoint that answer is as daunting an undertaking as mastering a Smith grind. But I will try it.

I attended an all-women college just over 30 miles northwest of the FDR skate park. During that prickly first semester, as I gauged the disappointing gap between my expectations of college life and the reality of living in a suburban dorm, largely isolated from the gender I most wanted to make out with, I spent a lot of time with searching online for communities to astral project into. Between a sparsely updated Flickr account and a soon to be dying Myspace page, I tirelessly monitored what was going on at FDR. Hot guys were hanging out at the skate park. Hot guys with unkempt hair. Hot guys with skinned knees. Hot guys with chapped lips. Hot guys who probably got detentions at school. Hot guys in torn vans and sweatshirts with band names I pretended to know. “Uh, of course I love Thursday.”

These hot guys certainly didn’t spend time at my comparatively pretentious liberal arts college. These were the cool, easy-going guys who didn’t care if I lived or die while I plugged my ethernet cable into the Cyber ​​Stalk. The ease and speed with which I was sure they would drive right past me, ignoring my existence, forever cooler than I’ll ever be, only increased my longing (working that out in therapy, don’t worry). My fantasy included bumping into one of these guys and with one look they would see my nascent beauty that has yet to be discovered by anyone else. Maybe they would show me how to do ollies? Maybe I was the only thing they could love besides their skateboard? As you can imagine, that fantasy never extended to the physical world.

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Conceptually, I fucking love the skateboarders’ all-American punk attitude. I think it’s great that basically the focus of the sport is “fuck the rules, party hard!”. mantra. I love that the sport started with a bunch of guys breaking into backyard swimming pools that were being emptied due to a drought and making up their minds to use them. Skateboarders are excitingly unpredictable and unruly. Their entire ethos is the spark that love and sex promise to ignite.

On a much more superficial level, I drool over the ill-fitting pants and torn shoes. Stupid bleached hair or half-shaved heads, which I suppose are drunken ventures taken too far, is as charming as it gets. Just as California exists in the American imagination as liberated and limitless, an afternoon spent skateboarding punk expands infinite possibilities. There are no rules in their paradise, are there? Or if there are any, we must break them! Hot!

The effortlessly cool rhythm skateboarders move to, in and out of crowds, up and down bowls, through office parks they’re not meant to be Honestly, loitering is sexually intoxicating. Few things turn me off more than guys saying “yes sir” to each other. Golf, with its corporate network overtones, is a libidinal death sentence. Despite skateboarding’s entry into mainstream culture, it remains hot, if not to the same scorching degree. When I see a person who is even moderately interested in the sport, I can see where their aspirations might lie – in this fantasy land of anarchist indulgence. But ultimately, to me, a punk driving around an empty parking lot is ten times more exciting than someone skating for Team USA at the Olympics.

Well, I have to be honest here: I never took the two-SEPTA train ride to FDR Park. I’ve suggested several times to my new college friends that we watch hot guys skate. Shockingly, there were no takers. “Do you skateboard?” one would ask. Stupid question. from coOf course not, I was just…appreciating the art behind it. “What would we do if we got there?” another would posit. fall in love duh “Do you have a friend that skateboards there?” Again, stupid question. It was more than friendship. It was lust.