The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (2 page)

I’ve come a long way in getting over my fear of the ocean, but I’m still new to surfing, and on a day like this the gnawing apprehension persists. I moved to New York City with a naive sense of enthusiasm and hope, but now that I’m actually trying to get my life together in this place with so many social undercurrents and financial riptides—now I’m spooked.

“Come on, Justin,” Dawn says after I express my Shakespearean anxieties. “These are the best waves of the year.” She pulls up her wetsuit zipper, stretches into a deep forward bend. Armed with her surfboard, she charges down to the jetty, where the swell thunders in at its tallest, most powerful point. I hang back on the beach, where part of me wants to drop anchor, play it safe, surrender to paralysis. But there’s a deeper pull at work, a stronger longing to get up and get moving—to hazard the risk and follow Dawn down into the churning sea.

I
’m obsessive.

Meaning I ruminate to excess about rip currents, sharks, heights, depths, failure, the future, death by drowning.

Or I latch on to something or someone I want and spend years in fervid pursuit.

My obsessiveness encompasses the word’s Latin roots:
ob
(opposite) and
sedere
(to sit).

Meaning I can’t sit still.

I crave motion, action, momentum. Skating, paddling, peddling: without these all-consuming physical activities I become easily bored, falling prey to darker obsessions, anxieties, self-destructive tendencies. I need an obsession to give my life a central organizing principle, to feel something like a sense of purpose. To keep from turning on myself.

In grade school, it was breakdancing. Some modern dancers from the local community college gave lessons in our school cafeteria, teaching us the moonwalk and the worm. When the film
Breakin’
came to town, the best breakers were invited to perform a floor show in the local movie theater. The most exciting event of my childhood: a bunch of us white Colorado kids rocking parachute pants, red bandannas, checkered muscle shirts, all of us dancing down on the syrupy theater floor, busting body locks, King Tuts, and backspins for a captive audience of a hundred or more. In return, we got to watch
Breakin’
from the front row, free of charge—something I did ten or twelve times, the characters Turbo and Ozone my new heroes, objects of my movement fetish, imaginary
homeboys
.

One of my best moves was the wave. It started in my fingertips: they reared up skyward like spindrift, then crash-curled downward, the energy rolling into my wrist—cresting up through my elbow and shoulder—before flowing out my other arm, dissipating into air. Sometimes the wave surged down my chest, through my hips, and into my knees, then rebounded back up and out my chin—the body wave. I did this for hours at a time, restless as the ocean, possessed by its rhythm.

I never stopped moving, popping and spinning, dancing, to the point that my parents grew concerned and eventually exasperated, suggesting that I sit still, slow down, take up other hobbies, or even just read a single book,
for Christ’s sake
.

When I was eleven, my father—another craver of motion—moved us from Colorado to La Jolla, California, where I took up body boarding. I was just graduating to surfing when we moved again, this time to the arid inland hills of east San Diego. No waves in sight, I started skateboarding—a skateboard being the perfect on-land vessel to satisfy my motion-lust.

In this case, the obsession lasts twenty-five years and counting.

My first job out of college was part-time manager of a skatepark in Boulder, Colorado. In the summers I migrated north to Oregon, where I ran the skateboard program at a summer camp on Mount Hood. I eventually went to graduate school to study writing, but also because more school meant more summers off, which in turn meant road trips to almost every skatepark in the state of Colorado, mile-long drainage ditches in New Mexico, bone-dry swimming pools east of L.A., San Francisco’s precipitous hills.

The constant need for motion and change made my romantic life difficult. When my long-term relationships ended—partly due to my skateboarding addiction—I spent months and sometimes even years obsessing over the women I’d lost.

After grad school, I sat still long enough to put together a book, albeit one about skateboarding. Called
Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the Deep End
, it included a short piece of mine titled “Whaling,” which detailed my Ahab-like obsession with skateboarding and the novel
Moby-Dick
.

In late May 2003, I traveled from Colorado to New York to meet with a potential publisher for
Life and Limb
; it was during this trip that I spotted my first New York City surfer. Walking down Christopher Street on my way to pitch the book, I saw him ascend from a subway station, up between green Art Deco lampposts, a surfboard tucked under his arm. There was something astonishing about it, like an ice climber on the streets of Los Angeles.

Standing there staring, I felt a subtle shift in the Gulf Stream of my obsessions.

I’d been skateboarding for decades but had gotten only a small, teasing taste of surfing during my teenage years in East County, San Diego. Like the majority of actual New York residents, I had no idea surfing was even possible here. Could you really ride the subway to the beach? If so, could you surf in the morning and hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art that same afternoon? The surfer and the idea of this underground hypermobility—between the city and the ocean, between the natural world and New York’s endless cultural universe—were both signal fires, drawing me eastward.

My meeting with the publisher went well and led to a modest book deal. Afterward I celebrated with my close friends Paul and Natalie in Brooklyn. They lived in a massive apartment in a former button factory, a quintessential artist’s loft with a rope swing in the hallway and exposed-brick walls covered with Paul’s enormous, photo realistic paintings of violet horses and polychromatic light bursts.

The kind of place that makes a tourist think living in New York is nothing but fun times, nonstop art-making, rainbows and rope swings.

And as it turned out, they were looking for a roommate.

A few months later, just after my thirtieth birthday—despite the serious misgivings of my friends and family, and especially my girlfriend Karissa, who still had a year of school left—I pulled up the moorings of my life, packed everything I owned into my little Toyota pickup, made the two-thousand-mile trip from Colorado to New York City.

New York, the place that Herman Melville scholar and biographer Andrew Delbanco calls “that peerless school for the study of literary careerism.”

I was banking on the skateboard anthology’s success and planned to follow it up with a novel, but other than that, I had zero job prospects. In an existence defined by motion, this was both the boldest and the most senseless move of my life.

F
rom a skateboarding perspective, the timing of my arrival in Brooklyn is fortunate. Some friends have just finished building an epic wooden skate bowl inside a semiabandoned warehouse on the East River in Greenpoint, a ten-minute ride from my new apartment.

My first evening in the city, my old college friend Kyle Grodin and I skate down Bedford, cut south at Kent, then roll through the desolate, post industrial border zone between Williamsburg and Greenpoint. A blustery September night; blue and green lights crown the Empire State Building, reflecting onto gray cloud cover like a dirty halo. The distinct smell of petroleum; a lone guy in a fedora and checkered Vans playing the trumpet on an abandoned corner; elaborate graffiti on every wall and water tower—
Neckface, SARS, LES
, multivalent wheat pastes by
Swoon
. The further north we skate the more bombed-out and abandoned the neighborhood becomes, until a row of massive, vacant warehouses rises up from the shadows. Smashed-out windows and crumbling brick walls, rickety catwalks spanning the upper floors, the entire complex tangled in razor wire.

Looming here on the banks of the Harlem River as it spills its poisoned guts into the Atlantic, these warehouses comprise the defunct Greenpoint Terminal Markets, a once-vibrant center of naval industry. Our destination was originally one of the largest nautical rope factories in the world.
¹
Months later, after I get a job in Midtown, I sometimes ride my bike to work along the waterfront in east Manhattan, right below Bellevue Hospital, where, from the other side of the river, this whole area has a severely decayed, third world look to it, like Beirut in the 1980s or San Francisco in shambles after the Great Earthquake.

Grodin and I enter the building through a creaky metal door that we have to heave open with both hands. The passage leads into a dismal stairwell littered with broken beer bottles, bricks, piles of soot. Then down a couple uneven steps into a shadowy open-air corridor with rusty fire escapes spiraling up into the dark between sixty-foot brick walls. Above us, a thin slash of starless sky; straight ahead, a narrow porthole onto Manhattan’s vertical sea of lights.

The muffled rush of urethane wheels circumnavigating the bowl reaches us from down the corridor, a sound like an old roller coaster coming off its rails. We enter another doorway, then find ourselves in a cavernous brick warehouse with fifty-foot-high ceilings. A stairway leads up to the deck, and there it is: an immaculate wooden bowl, sheeted with a fresh layer of Russian birch plywood, like the hull of a well-crafted ship. Amoeba-shaped, it fills up every square foot in the huge space, one section transitioning right up an extant concrete wall, which allows skaters to traverse the bowl’s boundaries and actually ride the old building itself. And everyone’s whipping around at supersonic velocities, carving and grinding to a sound track of eighties punk rock—Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the Dead Kennedys—so fast that it feels like they’re generating some invisible form of energy, like frenzied atoms in a particle collider.

I take a few warm-up spins and then pop out onto the deep-end deck, where Grodin introduces me to his friend Andy Kessler. Andy’s a compact guy with coal-black hair and a beak of a nose. Tan, weathered skin. As East Coast as they come. He looks to be in his forties, but there’s something youthful about him: he rocks a black sleeveless T-shirt, Levi’s, and low-top Keds; his slick-backed hair has a little curl in the front, like Danny Zuko from
Grease
.

Grodin tells Andy that I just moved from Colorado.

Andy grins, shakes my hand. “Welcome to town,” he says. “Now
get out of my town
.” He breaks into a friendly cackle, then drops in and rolls around the bowl, riding an oversized skateboard with a sharp, surfboard-like nose. His back hunched slightly like a surfer in a barrel, he powers through corners with his elbow crooked in front of his face, shielding his eyes from invisible sea spray. He’s pretty ancient by skateboarding standards, and doesn’t really do any tricks beside deliberate frontside grinds, but he has this classic style, honestly one of the best I’ve seen in my twenty-plus years of skateboarding. I later learn that he’s been skating since the early seventies, longer than anyone else in the city, longer than many of us in the room have been alive, and that in terms of skateboarding, New York City really is his town.

Grodin and I skate for hours, until just about everyone, including Kessler, clears out. After he’s gone, Grodin tells me more about him, how he’s a living legend in the skateboard world, a founding member of the Soul Artists of Zoo York, the seventies-era skate crew that was New York City’s equivalent of Dogtown and the Z-Boys in Santa Monica. And how, during the late eighties and early nineties, Andy disappeared onto the New York streets, having traded skateboarding for heroin. But that’s all history; he’s been sober for over a decade and is completely religious about going to NA meetings and riding his skateboard.

Kyle Grodin is something of a junkie himself—but his drug of choice is sugar. Before we met at my house he’d picked up a two-liter bottle of soda and a couple Snickers bars from the local bodega. Between runs he chugs Coke straight from the bottle or forces down a candy bar. The more he gorges, the harder and more guerrilla-like his skateboarding becomes. To say he skates like a guerrilla is an understatement, considering the way he sweats out his T-shirts, how he has to double up on socks to keep them from turning to sweaty mush, or the way he sometimes blows a trick out mid air, pitches his skateboard across the room, and howls like a primate. But the comparison isn’t entirely fair. He looks more like a seminimble circus performer getting shot out of a cannon; he can do shit that no one else can do—like fully inverted handplants over four feet of sheer vertical on the concrete wall—and he does it all while going a million miles an hour, a crazed grin on his face.

The other thing about Grodin is that once he gets a session started, he never wants to quit. Whereas for me skateboarding is an obsession, for Kyle it’s a borderline
mania
. If I had it in me to skate all night, he’d stay there with me, skating and sweating and grunting until dawn. But by one o’clock I’m ready to go home and get some sleep, at which Grodin voices his obvious disappointment.

“Home? Already?” he says, panting, dripping.

“Grodin, we’ve been skating
five hours straight
.”

“So? I’m just getting warmed up,” he says, then mops his face with his already-soaked T-shirt.

“I can see that. And I’m afraid you might blow a fucking gasket.”

“Are you kidding? I already blew all my gaskets back in the nineties.”

“Look, you can stay all night if you want,” I say, “but I’m going home.”

Not one to skate by himself, Grodin helps me close down the warehouse, cut the lights. We shuffle our way out the murky corridor, then roll back home through half-lit Brooklyn streets.