Heelflips
Every time an ollie sent me airborne, I watched my dim reflection in the windows of our garage. At ten I could ollie. Finally, briefly, defy gravity. If you could pop an ollie, you could heelflip, my skater friends said. Friends who could actually skate, soar over curbs and hydrants, their boards twirling beneath them, tethered to their bodies by an invisible string.
Invisible to me, anyway. For months I’d been failing to land a heelflip. I wore my shoes out kicking the tail of the board with my right foot, sliding my left foot forward and away, flicking the edge of the board with my heel and launching myself into space, the board spinning below me. But instead of landing on top, welcomed by the grip tape, I landed one foot on the bottom of the board, the Alien Workshop alien staring up at me, sickly green, its big eyes mocking. The other foot landed on the pavement, a grounded embarrassment.
August 1994. Summer. My final heelflip attempt in the driveway. My mother’s kotlets cooling on the counter, Persian beef patties glistening turmeric yellow. Robert Stack’s soothing voice telling my sister about some Unsolved Mysteries. The air thickens around me, humid and portentous. I stand on my board and inhale, staring at my shredded brown Etnies, envisioning success, loft, a controlled and graceful spinning. The cube is about to gleam. I kick. The tail plunges down, the nose slides forward and up I go…
Except I didn’t. Just another failed attempt. The Alien staring up at me, ridicule framed by the orange bushings of my Independent trucks.
I picked up my board and hid it, the evidence of my ineptitude, in the back of the garage. I hurried inside to the cooling kotlets and told myself there were more long summer nights to transform my middling ollie into a magnificent heelflip.
Only I never did. New interests appeared. A five-string bass and a brief stint in band that never played outside my friends’ basements. A double-chambered bong. Books. Girls. A wider world of heartaches. And beneath it all, the gnawing fear that the world was too vast to know, too complex to handle, and that no matter how much practice you put in, the mysteries would remain unsolved. Part of me now—thirty-eight, hunching my way into chronic back pain as I squint at the dusty screen of my laptop, moving words around the page, still struggling to achieve a lightness, to attain loft—worries that I lost my chance then. If only I’d persevered and landed that heelflip, I could have grasped it, some essential skill to understand the weight of the subsequent years, this alien world, and all my failed landings.