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Vice Blog

FRIDAY FICTION WITH JOCKO WEYLAND

This week's Jocko Weyland story is almost three times as long as the previous fictionettes we've run of his, which makes it roughly the length of a normal extremely short story. Think of it as a weekend read if you're so hung up on putting things in boxes. Story starts below…

31PH

Don’t even know how I met this freestyler guy, that’s been lost in the haze but sometimes those initial meetings get forgotten and all you have is one hour of vivid memory and that is exactly what I have left of this particular German whose apartment I ended up in one spring day. No remembrance of him before then, and never saw him again, so it’s just that one slightly embarrassing, really odd in hindsight hour. I do have a notion that we met at a flea market, don’t know why that is, maybe because around the same time I bought this sixties Swedish blonde wood chest of drawers. Could he have been a friend of the guy who I bought the chest from? It’s a mystery, all I know is that one morning I woke up totally hung-over with my mouth tasting like iron and realized I’d told this guy I’d meet him at his place around 11 am. Why so early on a Saturday is another mystery, as is why we didn’t meet for breakfast at a restaurant. Had he suggested coming over and I said yes because maybe I thought he had food or something? So weird, though if so his suggestion would explain certain subsequent events. All I knew about him was that he worked at the German consulate and that he’d written a book about skateboarding. Now this was 1995 when there were no books on skateboarding. Well, there were the ones from the 1970s but the spate of them, the deluge that came later, had not yet arrived. As an aside, there’s something a little out of whack about so many books devoted to celebrating such an ineffable physical pursuit. That’s how this guy got my attention, but why he had to show me the book at his apartment remains unanswered. Well, it was answered eventually, but at the time it wasn’t, leading to some confusion. Now the book, and he must have told me this, was a how-to book for freestyle skateboarding, and a German one at that. I do remember thinking that was pretty lame (to say the least) but since there were no current books whatsoever about skateboarding in 1995 my curiosity was piqued.  Before the flood. I must have been suspicious but I guess the novelty of it overruled my disinterest and snobbish attitude towards the endeavor.

Because freestyle, now that’s a whole thing. To make a long story short for a long time freestylers were the unhip, uncool, geeky, dorky, "gay," and more importantly than any of those things skateboarders who came close to not skateboarding and not being skateboarders. You appreciated what they did, you dutifully watched and said ‚Äòoh wow" but really, it was not something you could really get with. Too much precision, not enough anarchy. Somewhat paralleling the martial arts-like precision of modern skateboarding, which coincidentally owes a lot to freestyle. But that’s for another time. Back then freestylers were part of the skating scene by default because of freestyle’s role in skating’s development, and also because for so long skateboarding was such a beleaguered, persecuted activity that anybody who remotely showed interest or rode at all was accepted into the fold, no matter how short their shorts were or that they wore tennis-style headbands over their damnably blond spiky Swedish hair. To try and summarize, freestyle, which meant doing tricks with a smaller board than usual on flat ground, doing handstands on the board, flipping it and landing on it as it balanced on two wheels, all kinds of dancing and hopping around with the board as your platform, freestyle was a very important part of skateboarding and everybody did freestyle way back when, but by 1990 (actually around then it started blending in with what was called "street style" but that’s a little too complicated for the general overview here) it had become this highly specialized, extremely static gymnastic routine in which the skaters hardly moved at all, hence the categorization of freestylers as not really skaters. Because skating is going fast, pushing hard, wind in your hair, barely missing cars in the street balls-out going for it, which is the opposite of wearing knee-high white socks and hopping up and down in place like you’re on a damn pogo stick, dig?

So that’s the story on freestyle, in a nutshell. And in consequence, not to diminish their accomplishments, freestylers were hard (and still would be, except there really aren’t any of them left) to take too seriously and hard not to chuckle about for a variety of reasons, some of them just enumerated. Even if their tricks did become the basis for much of modern street skating (flip in, flip out, etc. ad infinitum) and an alarming number of them made millions of dollars off of skateboarding. Another reason they’re suspect, because while others were skating they were getting business degrees so they could eventually capitalize on skating becoming this outlandish, ridiculous "industry" in which sales of shoes have reached 500 million a year at least. Shoes. That said, all these thoughts were far off in the future as I biked down to Tribeca to the address I had for the guy and found myself in front of a brand new thirty-one story high-rise apartment building on Duane Street. And right away that struck me as kind of strange, because nobody I knew lived in a building like that. This particular high-rise was actually on the vanguard of the cookie cutter generic apartment building construction explosion that would really escalate in New York in the late 1990s, and oddly enough, even more so after September 11th, 2001.  So through the lobby and there’s a doorman for Christ’s sake, and I get ushered over to the elevators to go up to 31PH, which I didn’t even get in my dense hung-over state meant penthouse. And then I knocked on the door and there’s Rainier, or Wolfgang, or Markus, or whatever his name was, with his blond curly locks, a tight black t-shirt and pants that seemed a little too tailored on a Saturday morning.

I might have been there an hour; I think it was closer to forty-five minutes. We must have talked about skating, and I know he showed me his book, and when I looked at it I realized how off base it all was. Because, I mean, a how-to freestyle book published in Germany in the early 1990s, there’s really not much to say. I’m sure I raised my eyebrows or let out a little "shhh" through my teeth, tried to hide my reaction and then said "Oh yeah, cool, uh-huh." So we looked at that, probably talked about his job at the German consulate and gradually I started getting this distinctly uncomfortable feeling that it was time to get out of there. Like when you meet a girl and right away you realize something is not right and immediately start planning an exit strategy. Then three things happened almost simultaneously and that’s when it got weird and I knew I had to escape, soon. I don’t know what came first; the busts, the beer, or the Rolling Stones record. Let’s start with the record. He said hey do you want to listen to some music and though I thought that was a little odd I was like, sure, ok, and then he holds up this Rolling Stones record and says Yah this new one is very good and puts the CD into an expensive-looking flat black stereo console. I think it was the Steel Wheels album, or if not, some other equally execrable record the Rolling Stones put out in the late 1990s that made you wish they’d all died in a plane crash after Exile on Main Street or at the latest Some Girls. Just total crap, horrible beyond belief, and there I was looking out the windows at the Empire State Building on this hazy grey day as the geriatric Rolling Stones piddled out of the $5000 Bose speakers, and then Markus or Claus asks me if I want something to drink, a beer perhaps? Now I probably could have used a beer, in the hair of the dog sense, but something about offering me a beer right then that early in the day in conjunction with that awful music felt off-kilter. And that’s when maybe while he was in the kitchen getting himself a beer and I was saying "No that’s ok, thanks but I’m alright" kind of projecting my voice from the living room to where he was my gaze left the vista outside the penthouse windows and started traveling around the room with a little more discernment than before I noticed the busts. And the incredible thing is that I hadn’t noticed them earlier. Because, in three or four corners of the room were these black life size busts of male torsos. From the waist area to the neck, with extremely articulated musculature. Very Greco-Roman. What were they made out of? Marble? I doubt it. Some kind of black rubber? I’ll never know. I looked from one to another, and to another, heard Mick Jagger’s raggedy old voice screeching away and smiled at Gerhard when he came back in, twiddled my thumbs, and after a little more small talk and before he finished his beer made some abrupt excuse and said I had to go to work or something and in one of those hurried yeah sure let’s talk alright give me a call cool nice to hang out with you goodbye rushed interludes got out the door and practically ran to the elevator, which seemed to take forever to arrive. Got down to the muggy Tribeca street, looked up at the building, felt the safety of the New York mélange and headed uptown, never to see that German freestyler again.

JOCKO WEYLAND