One Last Trick
Wearing an unbound, steely-eyed, self-possessed look as the blood red sun starts to set before him beneath the last stretch of late July Ohio cornfields in the distance—after all, lest we ever forget, this is America, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”—Billy Ventura stands poised in his helmet, elbow and knee pads, chin up, chest out, shoulders thrown back, his right foot stamped down upon the tail of his skateboard, its wheels hanging over the vertical lip of his ten foot halfpipe as if in breathless anticipation. But zooming in to take a closer look at our young hero, or shall we say anti-hero, as he stands before us in arrested profile, you’ll notice his stance appears more telling, more truthful than his facial expression, hinting that maybe he’s not as ready and willing as previously perceived but hesitant, wary, perhaps even flat out afraid, his left foot placed a prudent half-step behind his right instead of alongside it atop the suddenly doom struck edge of the halfpipe’s gallows-like platform.
Alone on the sprawling Ventura backyard with no one left to cheer him on, alas, no one left to show off to—his skater crew along with his best friend, Jesse, having left half an hour ago, his parents out to see a movie, his older sister Cecilia out with her boyfriend, Pete, his little brother, Boy, at his kung fu class—Billy takes a quick deep breath then slowly exhales, realizing that he’s been holding his breath (which strikes him as totally idiotic since who the fuck forgets to breathe, regardless of the circumstance?). All at once he shivers, feeling the darkness drift down all around him with a ghostly rural quiet and a wafting up undercurrent of coolness in the air, the blood red sun casting elongated shadows across the vast lawn and the bulk of the halfpipe which now appears to resemble the sad hull of a marooned, never to be completed and set out to sea ship. SHIT. He suddenly remembers having to pick up Boy from the fucking kung fu studio in town. Well, he’s waited this long, he quickly reasons, so he can go on waiting a little longer. Still, he’d better hurry up. Soon it’ll be too damn dark to see so time is of the essence, time, now the main motivating factor in this latest dramatic episode of facing up to his evolving fear.
“Method Air.” Billy dares to name it aloud, the trick he’s been avoiding the whole damn day like some shameless pussy, the tweaked aerial he’d slammed hard attempting to land here just last week in the company of his skater crew. He had launched high, high into the air—a whole three feet higher than he’d ever gone before according to his stoked though, in truth, prone to wildly exaggerate friends and motley misfit cheering squad—pulling the board back with his left hand and arching his spine, knees bent and feet kicked up behind him, exhibiting picture-perfect form at the peak of his flight, Billy extending his right arm at that last split second before gravity reclaimed him, shooting it overhead in a dramatic, jaunty, airborne salute as if flipping off the very stratosphere, offering up a defiant FU-U-CK YOU-U-U!!! to these once unattainable heavens.
But he had slightly misjudged his re-entry out of sheer airborne enthusiasm, his rear wheels clicking just so against the metal coping, but enough to knock him right off his board and send him crashing down to earth with a cruel blindsiding abruptness that was utterly shocking, equally painful. And though this mishap had failed to break anything upon his stunned young person, it had badly bruised Billy’s right knee and knocked the wind right out of him with a sick-sounding and seemingly soul-expelling WOO-HOOOF. Luckily, he was able to limp off and collect himself upon the grass after an agonizing minute or two of half-breathless cursing and writhing about upon the flat bottom of the ramp with his crew rushing over and around him in an animated circle of talking heads:
“Du-u-ude, you al-right?”
“You came down hard, holmes—”
“Hard, but dude, du-u-de, you should have seen yourself, you were like, this high!”
“Yeah, holmes, then this close, THIS FUCKING CLOSE, a cunt hair away from landing that shit!”
“FUCK YEAH, DUDE!”
“FUCK YEAH, HOLMES!”
“SKATE and DESTROY! HAIL, BILLY, OUR FEARLESS LEADER!”
Despite his friends’ half-crazed enthusiasm, he didn’t feel like he’d simply wiped out or fallen, no, his interpretation later that night as he lay in bed with an ice pack wrapped around his bruised and throbbing knee was somehow more humiliating, more personally insulting than that. Recalling the soul shuddering feeling upon sudden impact, that bone-jarring and nauseating shock of abject self-awareness, Billy imagined himself being snatched up from behind, thrown down to the ground then promptly stepped on by a cruel stupid giant, the witless brute leaving him discarded and destroyed like a squashed insect twitching in its death throes upon the sidewalk…so Fuuuck, he now bemoans a whole week later, faced with this very same looming fear as he stands atop the platform of his halfpipe trying to muster up the courage for one final run, one last trick, the infamous “Method Air” to end the day, fuckfuckfuckFUUUUUUUCK…maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself, same as always. He actually pauses to consider for the first time in his life, the setting sun now pulsing before him with the whispery atmospheric orange hue of a waning hearth, a “last dying breath,” “letting go” sort of color.
Billy relaxes, taken in by the eerily soothing Technicolor Kodak moment. And though the halfpipe below him is draped in shadows, he steps his left foot forward onto his board and drops in without a second thought, Billy skating half-blindly now, feeling more than seeing, 50/50 grinding back and forth across the coping with a satisfying and soothing metal-upon-metal k-k-k-k-k-k-k-r-r-r-r-r-r-r, as if perfectly in sync with the expressed rhythm of the ramp, then setting himself up with a slick pair of backside airs—flick-swoosh…….flick-swoosh—and now going all out and pumping hard, straight up the transition, he launches over the vertical lip and high into the air, pulls his board way back at the peak of his flight—Billy hanging in mid-air, motionless, suspended, defying the strict law of gravity with athletic poise and theatrical flair, with STYLE if you will—then tucks it back beneath him on his way down a half-second later, totally sticks the landing, rides out the trick beaming like a wild-eyed maniac and yelling, “YESSSS,” dismounts onto the opposite platform, slams his board against the plywood then stands there for a moment, arms raised in triumph.
It’s times like this that he can’t help but imagine quitting football and committing to skating full time, or at least as long as the combined Midwestern spring, summer then the usual football-crazed fall would permit, forget about the goddamn dead of winter buried under blankets of snow and ice, those lucky fucking fair-weathered Californians able to skate to their hearts’ content the whole year round. But it’s too late, too late, Billy walks the thought back as if fearing he’d actually follow through with it, yes, it’s definitely too late, August two-a-day practices are just around the corner. And besides, there’s no way in hell he’d miss out on this year’s crazy-hyped-up season opener, his St. Dominic Crusaders against their perennial local arch rival, the Warren Highlanders, those dicks, he can-not wait to run their asses ragged. And doubly besides if he were to quit, he’d have to face up to his teammates’ and coaches’ question that would inevitably follow on the heels of their shock, outrage and utter disbelief: “WHY, Billy?”
Why indeed. He’s been a solid varsity starter as a running back and punt and kickoff returner for the past two years and now stands poised and ready at five foot eight inches, one hundred and fifty-five pounds, at the threshold of his breakout junior year with hopes of running for over a thousand yards despite his limited size (actually, not bad for a Filipino), carrying his team to a regional championship and earning All-Conference status as he reaped the victor’s spoils: the small-town yet seemingly big-time fame of having his picture featured on the front page of the local sports section of The Midleton Star, preferably an action shot of him shedding tacklers as he slashed in for a touchdown, the image accompanied by a praise-filled article by his favorite local sportswriter, Sam Newhouse; the glowing Monday morning respect and admiration of his non-combatant classmates as he walked proudly past them through the halls of St. Dominic after a hard-fought Friday night home field win like a general parading through the streets of this city he’d saved from foreign invasion, rape and pillage; and last but certainly not least there’s the girls, yes, the girls, especially the beautiful and mysterious virtual strangers from neighboring schools as they glided by him in town or at the mall with a sidelong glance or even a bold-faced and obvious smile of recognition, Billy buoyed up by this apparent proof that they’d heard and read all about him, that they would never, ever forget him.
“So why quit now?” the atmospheric pressure of the descending night now seems to bear down upon him and weirdly demand. “WHY?”
Not wanting to face up to this question or perhaps putting himself in more of a comfortable position to actually consider it, Billy takes off his sweaty helmet, elbow and knee pads and places them off to the side with his bottom-up board, stretches out atop the platform, lying on his back with his legs straight out in front of him, arms at his side, palms flat against the plywood, the warm solid feel of it offering him a sense of stability and pride. He’d built the halfpipe three summers ago with no prior experience, following the step-by-step instructions from a special issue of Thrasher Magazine and funding the whole endeavor with birthday and Christmas money from his generous aunt that he’d saved up, his dad driving him in the family station wagon between home, the local hardware store and lumber yard. And when he’d finished, Billy felt like he’d accomplished something special, something rare, something truly, purely his own.
Skating had hooked him like that right from the start. The opposite of football in a way, it wasn’t an organized, overtly competitive, team-oriented activity, let alone a Midwestern All-American one at that. Nor was it an established yet still edgy “individual sport” like West Coast surfing but a much more underground sort of thing, especially in Midleton six years ago when he’d first started. Or taking it to a whole other level, it could easily be said that skating wasn’t just an activity, a hobby, some cool thing to do per se but a lifestyle, a hardcore lifestyle that led straight through hell’s fiery front gates to the deafening, skull-pounding, soul-pummeling inner inferno of punk rock music, the sacrilegious permanency of tattoos upon once-virgin skin, the multiple masochistic piercing of not just the ears but the nose, eyebrows, lips, tongue, nipples, the dick, the pussy, and no doubt mind-scrambling drug abuse and wildly depraved sex-crazed antics, an anarchic lifestyle which permissive parents—first generation Filipino immigrants like his mom and dad or not—prayed their children would quickly outgrow if not outright avoid, or if it came down to it, luckily dodge like an errant bullet.
Billy dove in, delving deeper with each passing year, this, despite his budding and seemingly juxtaposed high school football career. Yet apart from his present summer skater look of long bangs highlighted blond at the tips, a gold pirate-style loop adorning his left earlobe, black high tops, camouflage green military fatigues he’d cut into baggy shorts, and on the back of his favorite bright blood red t-shirt, the revered skate company logo of a grinning skeleton with swirling eyeballs eerily intact tearing out a hole in a curtain with its pointy fingertips to stare out from Billy’s back like the undead host of some ghoulish skate theater of the damned, yes, apart from this mere look it all boiled down to fun, pure, exhilarating not to mention highly addictive fun for Billy. Sure, the slams and injuries sucked ass. But skating with his crew in curb-lined parking lots and abandoned delivery docks downtown, on his towering halfpipe in the emerald green paradise of his own backyard, or simply alone on a summer night through dimly lit suburban streets over the warm smooth rush of the asphalt, he’d lose himself just skimming along yet still virtually flying through the air, looking and feeling exactly like a Lost Boy straight out of Neverland sprinkled with pixie dust, or better yet, roguish Peter Pan himself taking flight, swooping up into the brilliant night sky riddled with stars, riding the wild winds of his eternal boyhood.
Now how the hell could he ever explain something like that to his teammates let alone Coach Thomas and Mueller since football was all about being a man, a man for Chrissake, and marching off to war, though certainly not to the beat of a different drum, ultimately proving oneself upon the proverbial bloody battlefield. Those jocks, young or old, would never understand, not in a million years, shit, he hardly understands himself!
Billy fidgets, shifts left, right then left again, clasps his hands behind his head, takes a deep breath and exhales, ignoring the now blood-orange sun setting upon the horizon to his far left and focusing upon what’s spread out directly above him, the darkening India ink-tinged summer sky. But then he wonders if he’s not just simply exhaling but actually sighing, laid out on his back as if marooned atop a mountain at the edge of the world and giving breath to some pent-up, profound yet unnamed emotion residing within him, some phantom reservoir of deep feeling that had risen beyond his full awareness and was now on the verge of overflowing, breaching the barrier of his mere boyhood and gathering into the force of a raging river, channeling the mysterious places in his heart he’d longed to explore. “Yeah, right,” Billy quickly scoffs at the very thought. But his voice echoes right back to him sounding like someone else’s, someone scared, unsure, terribly lonesome and insecure, someone lost who’s been looking, looking, desperately waiting for an elusive something or other to come along and sweep him up, away from himself, and change the conflicted course of his young life forever, these thoughts, these thoughts then suddenly a million more seeming to beam from his forehead, straight out of the blazing core of his overwrought brain, projecting up into the gigantic void of the early evening sky like a secret satellite signal searching, searching, hoping, probing, dying to make first contact, desperate for once—just for once, goddammit—to be not just seen, but truly heard.
Mike Vicencio is from Jersey City. He’s been a bookseller, bartender, carpenter, a freelance journalist and a full time editor, columnist and travel writer. He’s a big fan of college football, particularly Notre Dame, and he can hardly believe he still skateboards.