Skating consumed us, so much so that we were almost perpetually late for class each morning and after lunch. We had set up grind boxes and low rails in the side parking lot, much to the faculty’s disapproval because that was the teachers’ parking lot. Todd Johnson, Ash and I would bring thick wool socks to school and slip them over our regular socks during lunch so that we could slide down the wooden handrails on our shoeless feet. The wool socks made the rails so much easier to slide and by the time you reached the end of the twelve-stair flight, you were really cooking.
Ash was a good skater who was also even better on a snow-board, despite living in the one of the flattest cities in the world. Todd was a born ladies man and was the only one of our friends who ever managed to keep a steady girlfriend. He dated this bird named Andria and they fought like feral cats most days, but we all envied him for having a female around all the time.
I had very little interest in school studies. It’s too bad really, as I was a voracious reader of all genres and had a keen interest in music and the arts. I loved to draw and paint, but I loathed school, homework, exams and that sort of crap. I was also a lover of comic books and during final period I would sit and watch the second hand rotate on the classroom clock, doodling superheroes in the margins of my writing assignments. When the bell rang I talked to no one. I would make my way to my locker where Ryan was waiting for me. We would gather up a few books to make it look like we had homework to do and race towards the bus stop.
We always tried to sit in the back of the bus, because that’s what kids in high school do. My brother had met a kid in one of his classes who introduced himself as the Beave. Everyone else called him the Beave as well and I suspected the Beave might be cool because he carried a skateboard under his arm. Both my brother and I were also skaters, although we rode inline skates instead. The Beave took the bus downtown with us almost every day even though he didn’t live downtown. To this day I still don’t know where the Beave actually lived. One afternoon as we pulled away from the school, the Beave pointed back towards the school’s entrance.
“Lookee!” His nose twitched like a rodent’s.
The Beave was pointing at the school’s sign, which was a series of individual letters mounted high above the front entrance doors. Someone had climbed the roof and painted in the letter “T” in front the word Oak.
“Haha, Toak Park. Get it? Man I bet Jimmy the Banger put that up there. He’s a genius. That dude loves to blaze.”
The Beave rotated himself in his seat to face us.
“Check this out. I boosted it from Chem class today.”
The Beave had a tin cigarette container in his hand. He opened the lid and inside was a viscous shiny silver liquid.
“That looks like mercury,” I blurted, not able to curb the shock in my voice.
“It is mercury,” said the Beave with a mischievous smile which formed seemingly in slow motion across his face.
The bus came to a stop unexpectedly and the Beave lost his grip on the cigarette box. It tumbled to the ground, hit the floor and the quicksilver lived up to its name, running chaotically between the vinyl grooves of the flooring of the bus. The Beave lifted his feet off the floor and crossed his legs on the seat. My brother and I followed his lead. We watched, mesmerized, as beads of mercury raced against themselves, back and forth with each movement of the bus, like an ocean’s tide.
At our stop downtown, the Beave exited with us. We told him we were heading to our place to grab a snack and our skates then we were going to head over to the Edge to ride the ramps.
“The Edge, yeah, I skate there all the time,” he said looking over his shoulder, completely disinterested.
“Do you want to come with?” I asked.
“Nah, I got some business downtown,” he shrugged and started off on his own.
My brother and I skated the Edge almost everyday for five years and we never saw the Beave there once.
The Edge Skate Park was originally located on Nairn Street in an old fire station. They had a four-foot mini ramp with a six-foot extension on one side. There were some scattered quarter pipes and various street obstacles, but the real draw was the eleven-foot vert half pipe with a roll in. The ramp was so high you could catch air between the steel columns of the rafters. The masonite surface had been painted with black paint that made it twice as slick. A few years back, this skater named Dennis took a bucket of grimy water and added three cans of cola to it. Then he mopped the whole surface of the ramp and let it dry. The sugar from the cola-water mixture gave our urethane wheels the perfect traction. From then on, someone mopped the floor the same way before every session.
The skate park had opened its doors in 1989 and two guys named Peter and Luke ran the skate sessions. Over the course of a year, the youth patronage grew exponentially until an announcement was made during a session that the Edge would close its doors and re-open in a new location at the corner of Lily and Pacific Avenue in the heart of Winnipeg’s exchange district.
Luke opted not to reprise his role of running the new Edge location, while Peter was ecstatic about the new spot. Peter handled the design and layout of the skate park ramps and street course, all the while listening intently to the requests from the various skaters who anxiously awaited the doors to open. Damian, Ash, Ryan and I even answered the call for volunteers because it meant we could skate for free anytime we wanted to. We also liked Peter.
Peter was cool. Besides being able to “talk the talk” about skating or biking, he also knew a lot about other street things such as graffiti art. He was a graph master and he used the walls of the new Edge as his canvas. I connected with him because of my own personal interest in art and drawing. Meanwhile at school, my grades began to slip more and more. The only class I participated in was art class, which is where I met Terry. He was two years older than me but hadn’t graduated yet.
“Art doesn’t have deadlines,” he would say. “I have a very stringent process of elimination. If it doesn’t feel right than it isn’t.”
It seemed to me that he never finished any art piece he started. Terry never really worked all that hard at his artwork but stressed about it all the time. This was oddly uncharacteristic of him though, because outside of art class he had a very simple and laid back approach to everything. A lot of girls liked Terry because he was so easygoing but more importantly because he was old enough to buy them booze whenever there was a party.
Terry liked to drink himself. His choice was always beer and it was rare to see him without a beer in his hand, although he never appeared to be drunk. He didn’t slur his words or stumble around. He was sharp, quick-witted and even occasionally charming.
Terry also held two jobs, which came as a surprise to me, probably due to his lackadaisical attitude. He worked at the drive-in movie theatre and gave free admission to my broke friends and me because he worked the ticket wicket. I liked Terry. Not because he let us in for free but because he didn’t do it to gain favour, he just did it, even though Damian and Todd were dressed only in their boxer shorts at the time because of the intense summer heat.
Terry also held a job at a local convenience store in Charleswood. He worked at the store on weekends and the theatre most other nights. Some of my other friends like Bill and Damian worked jobs but eventually got fired for being late, eating the merchandise, being rude to customers, or whatever teenage delinquent act seemed appropriate that day.
School rolled on and into the second semester. It was going to be a difficult second term with a tough load of classes, which included math and chemistry. I didn’t know anyone in my chemistry class. The lab desks sat two at a table. When I arrived, I sat alone in the back with the intention not be noticed. My plan lasted all of fifty-eight seconds.
“This seat taken?”
Her name was Dana and I’d seen her hanging around the smokers’ doors even though she didn’t smoke. She hung out with kids your parents wouldn’t want you to hang out with and in this instance, your parents wo
uld be right for once. She had long dark hair and small lips and didn’t dress like the other girls. She dressed kind of like a punk and kind of like a folkie. She always wore dark boots with flat heels cut just below the knee, which made her look taller than she was. She wasn’t fat or thin but landed somewhere in the middle. She looked good and she knew it. She often got her way with people, especially guys.
“It’s a yes or no,” she said, waiting for me to stop staring.
“No.”
“Good. I hate sitting in the front.”
I smiled. “Me too, I always sit in the back. I do the same on the bus.”
“You take the bus?”
“Yeah, I live downtown. But we’re moving soon.”
She made intense eye contact with me. I felt uncomfortable but didn’t look away.
“You’re not from Winnipeg?”
“No, we moved here from Regina not too long ago.” “A new-boy.”
“I guess, whatever that is.”
“It’s a boy who is new. It’s not supernatural. You sure you’re ready for chemistry class?” she mocked, smiling at me.
I screwed my face up a little at her. “It was this or biology. I kind of wish I’d selected biology.”
“Yeah I know. Then you wouldn’t have to sit beside me. I talk a lot.”
“No it’s not you it’s—” She cut me off.
“I know it’s not me.” She smiled in a nonchalant way looking down at her class schedule then looked back up at me. The room got warm.
I saw a lot of Dana over the next few weeks. She always seemed to pop up wherever I was. My feelings about her were complicated; she was attractive, an opinion that was shared by many, but something about her made me only want to be her friend and nothing more. Other high school girls worried about candy coloured lip-gloss, the brand of jeans they wore and who would date Rodney, the Captain of the Raiders. Dana didn’t give a shit and I liked that a lot.
As summer rapidly approached so did the last days of school. We had finally moved into our new home. When living in Regina, my brother and I had an eight-foot half pipe in our back yard. My father, who had promised our move to Winnipeg was the last one we’d make, had hard time convincing us of such. As part of his bargaining posture, he offered an amount of cash to build a new eleven-foot half pipe in our back yard once we had settled in.
In art class, I mentioned to Terry that I was building a half pipe in my back yard because at some point, he had mentioned that he used to skateboard. Terry said he had actually built many ramps in the past for friends.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked, sensing my lack of faith in his completion skills.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just, well, you’re so busy here,” I said, trying to change the slant of my words by emphasizing how important his art was.
“The art can wait. The summer’s here my friend, a ramp waits for no man. We must build this thing and then we must skate it.” He looked crazed, but his enthusiasm was genuine and hard to ignore.
My dad was thrilled that Terry was going to help build the ramp because Terry agreed to work for beer. As long as my dad had beer waiting for him, Terry showed up for work, and on time too. We would work on the ramp and then go street skating together. Sometimes Damian or Ash would join us, who were more than anxious to see the ramp completed. In the meantime, we divided our time between skating the Edge and skating the street. We spent the greater part of our summer driving around in my parent’s minivan, scoping out spots to skate around the city of Winnipeg.
Skating on the street happened mostly later at night because the local businesses didn’t like you skating on their property and often if a business employed a security guard, they would yell at us to leave the premises. This of course was understandable, however we selected our responses very carefully and tried our best to articulate a strong curse word into an intelligent sentence. Damian once pulled down his jeans and the city of Winnipeg experienced two full moons in one evening. There was the odd time that we would be approached by a real police officer. We spoke less abrasively towards the police but still showed little to no respect for them. We weren’t bad kids really; we just didn’t understand all the forced discipline and authoritative bull being jammed down our throats. Thus we often responded to people in negative ways. In truth we just wanted to skate which to us seemed like a very wholesome activity, despite the late hours we did it at. When most other kids were trying to score alcohol illegally or were hot-boxing their cars and smoking up with their friends, we were out sliding down handrails, trying our best to get good at something that unfortunately no one else understood except us.
Terry and I continued to work on the ramp. We wanted to finish it before school ended so we could start skating it immediately. We did run into some snags though.
“I’m not sure that’s right,” I said, looking at one of the braces supporting the lower transition on the ramp.
“If it doesn’t feel right than it isn’t.” Terry was looking at the crude spec drawing he had made during art class.
Terry put back the rest of his beer and popped the cap on a fresh one.
“No big deal. Let’s go skate a bit and clear our heads. Things will look right when we get back.”
I didn’t see how avoiding the problem was going to fix it but Terry seemed pretty persuasive. I agreed to take a break as we had been working almost all evening and it was starting to get dark. When we got back, the sun had disappeared completely and the sky was black.
“See? Problem solved,” he said, looking at the ramp.
I looked too, but it was too dark to see the problem anymore. Terry seemed satisfied with these results and grabbed another beer.
It was Friday and chemistry class was almost over. I had a hard time staying awake and kept nodding off, but Dana kept jabbing me in the side with her elbow to wake me up. I looked up at the clock and did my best to stay awake for the last twenty minutes of class. Dana handed me a tiny little book she had made during class, which consisted of an encyclopaedia of skater slang words. It was actually rather impressive and had little explanatory drawings to accompany certain words. The booklet had an elastic binding and I spent the remainder of class rather entertained.
When the bell rang, I collected my books and started to make for the door.
“Where are you off to so fast?” Dana asked pryingly.
“Nowhere. It’s Friday and I want to get out of this place.”
Dana looked at me and said nothing for a moment.
“Oh, okay.” She looked disappointed.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing, I was just going to ask if you wanted to go to a party with me and a couple of my friends tonight, but if you’re hanging out with your gang…” She said the last part with a sarcastic eye roll.
“Nope, I was just going to work on the ramp with Terry but I could do something after that. Besides, we can only work outside until it gets dark.”
“Cool, I have my parent’s car tonight. I’ll pick you up at nine?”
“Yeah, okay, sure.”
She wore a sincere smile when I accepted. I suddenly felt nervous. I had never met any of her friends. They didn’t even go to our school.
I met Damian and Ash in the hallway outside of chemistry class and we walked to my locker. Todd was there with Bill and my brother. They had all made plans to go street skating downtown that evening.
“You and Ryan going to take the van and meet us there?” asked Damian.
“I can’t guys, I’ve got plans with Dana.”
Damian laughed. “Ouch! You’re gonna ditch us for a bird?”
“Come on man, it’s not like that at all, plus she’s not that bad,” I said defensively.
“I heard she hangs with some pretty messed up dudes down on Osborne on the weekends,” added Ash, looking genuinely concerned.
I had never thought to ask Dana where the party was. I had also heard the rumours about her too but never cared.
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br /> Todd was smiling at me then looked at the rest of the gang, “You all have got to cool down. Your boy here is heading out with a girl tonight. When is the last time any of you went out with a girl?” If there had been any crickets in the walls of Oak Park High they had missed their cue that afternoon.
That evening, Terry sat on the curb of my driveway and sipped a cold beer as the sun fell over the western horizon. I sat next to him and had just popped the top on a can of cola. I set the can out in front of me on the road.
“You popped it but aren’t drinking it. That’s a crime in some countries, you know,” said Terry, looking down at the perspiring can in the warm summer heat.
“I like to let it breathe a bit,” I said, half smiling. “You think we’ll finish the ramp before school’s out for summer?” I asked.
“Yup, well maybe, I don’t know. We’ll finish when we finish.” It was a classic Terry answer. I took a sip of cola. The smudgy colours of the setting sun had been painted across the sky. We sat and drank until a Plymouth Reliant pulled into my driveway. Dana killed the headlights and stepped out of the car.
“Hey Terry.”
“Hey Dana.”
“You two know each other?”
“Yup.” They both answered exactly the same way at the exact same time.
“You ready to go?” Dana asked, looking past Terry to me.
“Yeah sure,” I replied, and then looked at Terry. “You want to work on the ramp tomorrow or something?”
“Maybe, if your dad fills the beer fridge. He’s all out.” Terry got up and walked down the street, waving with his back to us.
Charleswood Road Stories Page 6
