Cold Beer and Flat Spots

The local skate rats wanted to go downtown and bomb the parking garages and Manny said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, a lesson plan on gravity and broken bones. I, unfortunately, only had access to one board—this prehistoric boat from like 1987; some dead kid’s Vision Psycho Stick that emanated out of Manny’s garage smelling like motor oil and the (literal) dead past. The trucks were so seized with rust that they barely turned, and the wheels were the color of old teeth.

“Dude, what is this thing?” I held it up.

Manny looked at it like he was imagining collateral damage, that Que será, será flicker of premonition. Then he grinned. He had this evil grin that meant the world was on fire (the missing tooth helped) and that was genuinely fine with him.

“Fuck it, ride that piece of shit until the wheels fall off.”

This thing is a coffin, I thought. I am going to ride a rusty, outdated coffin down a parking structure at midnight half drunk at speeds over 20 miles per hour like a fucking lunatic.

And with that, something in me just released, similar to an asshole unclenching. I mean, what else are you supposed to do when you’re nineteen and the suburbs are eating you alive and the only conviction you and your friends practice is fearless, balls-to-the-wall momentum?

We made a pit stop at the crackhead liquor store on West Capitol, the one with the bulletproof glass so scratched it was basically opaque, and where Miguel who worked the register never asked for ID because he understood on some cellular level that we were already beyond saving. Adrian grabbed a 24 pack of something “High Gravity” and terrible tasting. A few cholos stood underneath the humming fluorescent light outside drinking out of brown bags and listening to oldies.

I feel like I’m living a vampire fever dream, I thought, watching the city grid materialize through the windshield, the sad and solitary signal lights cycling through their colors for no one but a few sleeping homeless. I watched the other vampires cracking open their beers and trying their hardest to stoke their bravado while the garage waited in the dark—a 12 story concrete totem paying homage to its fossil fuel deities and our potential destruction.

Until the wheels fall off, I thought. Yeah, obviously. And then you find out what you are without them.