Dogtown and Z Boys
It’s hard not to feel foolish after taking a spill when you are a forty-two year old mother skateboarding in front of your house. Add to this the fact that you live on a busy street where inevitably someone you know drives by as your board slides out from under you and bounces off the tire of a passing car. Your only saving grace is the armor covering your extremities: elbow pads, gloves, and a helmet firmly strapped to the noggin some may feel no longer possesses much sense. Having been brought down a notch by your spectacular spill, you can only nod when your ten year old daughter rolls up on skateboard to ask if you are okay. But when all is said and done you feel proud, because how many forty-two year old mothers do you know who skateboard? The fact is there are more than you think.
I was fifteen when I took my first spill on a skateboard, and the culprit was gravelly terrain on a road near San Francisco’s Julius Kahn Park that took a chunk out of my elbow. It was the road that betrayed me, not the equipment, which was the finest the ‘70’s had to offer, a Santa Cruz fiberglass board with sticky orange wheels that gripped the pavement and bore the nickname “o.j.’s.” I wore pads and gloves, and normally sought out the smooth surfaces of newly paved streets. I had gotten good enough at turns to negotiate the sidewalks of San Francisco’s steeper hills. I hung out with boys because I was the only girl I knew who skated.
In 2002 surfer/skater Stacy Peralta produced and directed “Dogtown and Z Boys,” the movie about the birth of pool skating in a gritty section of Santa Monica in the 70’s. I was one of the first in line to see it, and my only disappointment (which lingered after I saw the fictional version, “Lords of Dogtown”) was that there was so little footage of Peggy Oki, the one girl on the Z Boys’ skateboard team. Was she shy about being in front of the camera? Or was Stacy Peralta (in my estimation a brilliant director) too consumed in the story of his own Z Boyhood to pay much attention to what was happening to the few girls who hit the pavement with their boards in the 70’s?
In “Dogtown and Z Boys,” Peralta mixed footage of the Z Boys in the ‘70’s with interviews of team members as adults. The former team members claimed to be imitating the style of one surfer whose moves were particularly innovative; when a skater carved turns low to the ground, planting a hand on the pavement and pivoting on his hand, he was imitating the surfer who swept a hand through the wave as he carved a turn across its face. But planting a hand on the pavement when arcing a turn is intuitive, because in 1976 I was doing just that on the hills of San Francisco, and I had never been on a surfboard.
I surfed my first wave at thirty-seven, and like most who try it I fell in love with it. At that point I had all but abandoned skateboarding. But not long after I started surfing, when the Pacific coast was cursed with flat summer conditions, I couldn’t resist the urge to hop on my old Santa Cruz skateboard, which my kids were using to roll up and down the sidewalk on their bellies. It felt good, and it wasn’t long before I bought myself a Sector Nine, a longboard with a flexible deck. The underside of the deck was covered in a photograph of perfect peeling waves, and it had wide trucks that cranked out turns. After my purchase I looked for any excuse to hop on the board, strapping my son Eliot, who was three at the time, into the jogging stroller, and pushing him around town on errands.
I remember the concrete gully, long since overgrown with weeds, a sort of half pipe off a drain on Highway One near San Andreas Road in Santa Cruz, which I visited on weekends in high school. But these days I have no interest in skate parks or ramps. Instead, I seek out the newly paved surfaces (albeit flatter ones) and turn up and down the curves of people’s driveways as if I were still a renegade high school kid. As my body gets less agile and the turns stiffer, I skate less, and the day will come when I give it up altogether. Then I will be all the more grateful for the ocean.
My daughter Carly uses the old Santa Cruz skateboard now, as well as the Gravity board we bought her a few years ago. At thirteen she surfs the point breaks with me, and recently rode tandem with the surf- dog son of a shaper in San Onofre. Despite its PG-13 rating, she watched “Dogtown and Z Boys” a couple of years ago.
My friend Nana was also first in line to see “Dogtown and Z Boys.” She went with me, because neither of our men had no interest in seeing a movie about skateboarding. In 1976 Nana was the only girl she knew skateboarding the streets of Los Gatos. As we walked home from the movie, Nana and I agreed we were glad we had found each other. I hope Peggy Oki has her own surfing and skating sister, or better yet, a whole posse of ‘em.
I was fifteen when I took my first spill on a skateboard, and the culprit was gravelly terrain on a road near San Francisco’s Julius Kahn Park that took a chunk out of my elbow. It was the road that betrayed me, not the equipment, which was the finest the ‘70’s had to offer, a Santa Cruz fiberglass board with sticky orange wheels that gripped the pavement and bore the nickname “o.j.’s.” I wore pads and gloves, and normally sought out the smooth surfaces of newly paved streets. I had gotten good enough at turns to negotiate the sidewalks of San Francisco’s steeper hills. I hung out with boys because I was the only girl I knew who skated.
In 2002 surfer/skater Stacy Peralta produced and directed “Dogtown and Z Boys,” the movie about the birth of pool skating in a gritty section of Santa Monica in the 70’s. I was one of the first in line to see it, and my only disappointment (which lingered after I saw the fictional version, “Lords of Dogtown”) was that there was so little footage of Peggy Oki, the one girl on the Z Boys’ skateboard team. Was she shy about being in front of the camera? Or was Stacy Peralta (in my estimation a brilliant director) too consumed in the story of his own Z Boyhood to pay much attention to what was happening to the few girls who hit the pavement with their boards in the 70’s?
In “Dogtown and Z Boys,” Peralta mixed footage of the Z Boys in the ‘70’s with interviews of team members as adults. The former team members claimed to be imitating the style of one surfer whose moves were particularly innovative; when a skater carved turns low to the ground, planting a hand on the pavement and pivoting on his hand, he was imitating the surfer who swept a hand through the wave as he carved a turn across its face. But planting a hand on the pavement when arcing a turn is intuitive, because in 1976 I was doing just that on the hills of San Francisco, and I had never been on a surfboard.
I surfed my first wave at thirty-seven, and like most who try it I fell in love with it. At that point I had all but abandoned skateboarding. But not long after I started surfing, when the Pacific coast was cursed with flat summer conditions, I couldn’t resist the urge to hop on my old Santa Cruz skateboard, which my kids were using to roll up and down the sidewalk on their bellies. It felt good, and it wasn’t long before I bought myself a Sector Nine, a longboard with a flexible deck. The underside of the deck was covered in a photograph of perfect peeling waves, and it had wide trucks that cranked out turns. After my purchase I looked for any excuse to hop on the board, strapping my son Eliot, who was three at the time, into the jogging stroller, and pushing him around town on errands.
I remember the concrete gully, long since overgrown with weeds, a sort of half pipe off a drain on Highway One near San Andreas Road in Santa Cruz, which I visited on weekends in high school. But these days I have no interest in skate parks or ramps. Instead, I seek out the newly paved surfaces (albeit flatter ones) and turn up and down the curves of people’s driveways as if I were still a renegade high school kid. As my body gets less agile and the turns stiffer, I skate less, and the day will come when I give it up altogether. Then I will be all the more grateful for the ocean.
My daughter Carly uses the old Santa Cruz skateboard now, as well as the Gravity board we bought her a few years ago. At thirteen she surfs the point breaks with me, and recently rode tandem with the surf- dog son of a shaper in San Onofre. Despite its PG-13 rating, she watched “Dogtown and Z Boys” a couple of years ago.
My friend Nana was also first in line to see “Dogtown and Z Boys.” She went with me, because neither of our men had no interest in seeing a movie about skateboarding. In 1976 Nana was the only girl she knew skateboarding the streets of Los Gatos. As we walked home from the movie, Nana and I agreed we were glad we had found each other. I hope Peggy Oki has her own surfing and skating sister, or better yet, a whole posse of ‘em.
posted by Victoria Tatum at 1:33 PM
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