‘Skate Stories’ is our ongoing collection of personal essays about skateboarding. This is an opportunity for diverse voices to give us their unique viewpoints and experiences within and without skateboarding. These stories represent the experiences and opinions of the authors, not the magazine, although we are proud to fill our pages with as broad an array of perspectives as possible. Comment is free, discussion is encouraged – but let love prevail. – SKATEISM
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I have been skating since I was 7 years old. I saw the iconic and influential Extremely Goofy Movie and I was hooked. My dad knew how to push a little. He only knew how to “wheelie” and “tick tack” but it was enough to get me started. My Walmart Tigger skateboard was my favorite thing, and I’d ride it in circles on our back patio for hours, just turning, wheelie-ing, and spinning. Our house was on a hill and our driveway was an angle of almost 45 degrees, and 20 feet long. When I was about ten I started bombing it — a helmet, pads, and sometimes even a mouth guard were required by my mom. I didn’t care too much though, I got to skate. That was enough for me.
Words by Bitty
(Trigger warning: this essay contains transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist slurs)
I had no frame of reference for the culture of skateboarding. I was a weird girl who couldn’t make friends, dishonorably transferred from a Catholic school. Despite growing up in Costa Mesa, I didn’t know about any pros was until I was 11, when someone snuck a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on to the classroom’s communal iMac. I was amazed by the game, but I genuinely believed it was a kind of made up version of skateboarding, like the impossible tricks in my beloved Goofy Movie.
When I was 12, a co-worker of my mom heard I liked skating and took me to Joker’s skate shop in Huntington Beach. I was euphoric when I saw the wall, which was stacked with skateboards to the ceiling. I picked a deck with red grip tape like a race car, and some soft urethane wheels. I was ecstatic. Equipped with my helmet, pads, and brand new skateboard, my mom took me to the legendary Volcom skatepark.
I spent that first day learning the flow, and how to not get run over. The following days I didn’t learn any new tricks at the park. The one thing I learned very quickly was that I was a poser.
I held my board in a “mall grab” by the trucks. I had fat longboarding wheels, while all the people who did tricks had hard wheels that sounded like cracking whips on concrete. Everyone’s grip tape was black. My red race car deck stuck out like a sore thumb. I wore uncool protective gear while most kids left their helmets at the side until someone yelled “five-oh!” And then they’d rush to put on helmets before the police could give out tickets. My uncombed long hair and oddly deep voice had me either looking like a girl who lived in a dumpster or the boy child of homeless surfers. I was usually the only girl at the skatepark, except for sometimes the moms of little kids. If an older teen thought I was a girl, I would often be told “you suck, girls don’t skate.” If I was perceived as male, the older boys called me “fag” for having a colorful board, riding “pussy” wheels like a “poser,” and being ultra padded (because I was a “pussy”). If a person couldn’t tell what I was, I was written off as an “it”.There was a standard of cool, I never got close.
I was used to being picked on for being a tomboy, so I tried to ignore it. I liked riding up and down the slopes and up the ramps, even if I never got air. As puberty set in, the bullying got worse. Kids with status in skateboarding adopted gang-like mentalities to exclude posers. I had my skateboard stolen multiple times, my breasts grabbed, my pants yanked down. My mom came to rescue me by releasing our family mastiff into the park once. The next day, I was ridiculed at school for needing my mom to save me. I felt so ashamed of being a poser that I stopped going to the park. I let my cherished Flip deck collect dust in my closet. My mom’s insistence that I wear pads even in the backyard made me feel like a poser even when there was nobody around, but I never wanted to disobey my mom. The bullying at school had intensified, and there was a lot of turmoil at home. To comfort me my parents told me that they had prayed for a baby girl when my mom was infertile, and that I was their miracle baby. It was a loving sentiment, but deep down something about it pained me. I didn’t have the words to explain it, I thought I was crazy. I fell into a deep depression at 14. I stopped doing anything I liked.
After middle school I was sent to a small charter high school, where none of the popular bullies who terrorized me would go. As parts of the fog lifted, I saved up my money for a short cruiser. I went back to bombing the hills in my neighborhood alone. My mom gave up on her crusade for me to wear the pads I had outgrown. Skateboarding was the only time I felt close to myself. My hair would be weightless, flowing behind me. I was so in tune to my movements; the parts of my body I hated in the mirror were irrelevant. I wasn’t any of the things people called me, and I wasn’t the girl I saw in the mirror. I was just me, one with the speed and wind and sweat.
Sometimes I would return to Volcom to skate early in the morning when nobody was around. My fear of being seen there paralyzed me. The minute there were more than two people in the park I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from crying and I would go home. I was so paranoid. I kept trying to learn tricks, but I never could stay long enough to master anything. I knew that if someone saw me there and I couldn’t do a single basic trick they’d sense I was a poser and attack. I knew I didn’t belong, so eventually I stopped going altogether.
I decided to focus my talents on sidewalk surfing. I taught my friends to be skaters, since befriending “real” skaters was out of the question. For the first time I was the expert, at least as far as my nerdy theater friends were concerned. We’d skate the boardwalks of Newport and break into elementary schools at night to see who could manual the longest down the halls. I led these otherwise model students to the edge of what we jokingly referred to as “the gnar” to shred. I definitely didn’t want them be posers, so I ruled with an iron fist. I wouldn’t tolerate mall grabbers or mongo pushers. Everyone who I taught to skate had to hear me tell the cautionary tale of how Chris Cole couldn’t go pro until he stopped pushing mongo. I thought by doing this I’d spare them being called posers when they encountered other “real” skaters in the wild.
But when I dragged my tail to stop at the end of the session, when I was done making everyone laugh, I felt so empty. Skating made my body feel free. Without it I was forced to endure my physical form, with hips and breasts I didn’t want. I felt guilty for being so ungrateful to God for the beautiful long hair any girl would want but I hated. If I had liked myself more I might have adopted a Hot Skater Girl™ persona, but it never felt right. While I never let my girlfriends tolerate people who told them that girls couldn’t skate, I didn’t feel like one myself. I remember once a guy saw me teaching my girlfriend to push and he said “the first step is you have to grow a dick, bitch.” When she fell down. I could have snapped back “I’m a girl and I’ve been skating for almost ten years!” But it felt like a lie. I just helped my friend get up and start over in silence.
I brought my skateboard to college with me and it became my primary mode of transportation. I started working at a gender equity center, followed my lifelong dream of buzzing my hair off, and got outed as bi to my parents. I had adopted the bisexual label upon learning about the LGBT community, in hopes it would explain why I wasn’t like other girls. I had barely come out to myself when my parents found out. To the student body of Cal State San Bernardino I was the funny queer skater girl, well liked and popular. To my parents I was a complete failure. My mom told me she was hurt by my “choice” because she “had to bury the girl in the white dress who would be walked with her daddy down the aisle.” I could have bargained with her; queer folks have traditional weddings all the time. I could very easily have a traditional wedding with a man. Hypothetically I could still be a girl in a white dress someday.
But I couldn’t tell her any of that because I knew it was a lie. If she buried a girl in a white dress it was a stranger. My whole life I had hated wearing dresses, and rolled my eyes when my mom forced me to watch episode after episode of “Bridezilla.” My mom didn’t love me for who I was, she loved someone I had never been. I took my skateboard and did my best to return home as little as possible.
I skated every day in college. Plagued by insomnia, I’d often post on the CSUSB Yik Yak open invitations message board looking for people to ride campus with late at night. Riding with randos was one of the quiet joys that soothed my loneliness. It was usually casual longboarders who wanted to get better at skating, which forced me to get over my prejudice against such contraptions. I actually caved and got one myself. I had a lot of friends at school, I wished that made me feel less pain. My whole life I wanted to please my parents. Even in the throes of high school depression I tried to get good grades for them. I thought going to college would make them proud of me. Instead they believed college had turned me into some kind of communist SJW, living a life of sin.
In 2016 my new boyfriend noticed that Trump’s election bothered me more than most people. I was one of those people who sought counseling immediately after, the election being the realization of fears I hadn’t even known I’d had. But I figured it out quickly enough. I had been working at the gender equity center long enough to know the source of my apprehension and discontent had a name: transgender. The concept of gender dysphoria explained the body issues I’d had my whole life. Hosting events like women’s comedy night and feeling like an imposter wasn’t because I didn’t believe that women needed a comedy night, it was because I was never a woman. My parents’ support of Trump brought out the worst in them. My father often joked that “trannys” have high suicide rates with or without a sex change, so they should kill themselves to clear out the gene pool and save our tax dollars for more important things, like test flying F-35s. I feared coming out to my boyfriend because he had lived a mostly sheltered life. He hadn’t even heard of the concept of gender identity until he started hanging around my work. I lost my parents because I was queer, and I feared losing him too. He already knew I was bi, but being trans was a brand new can of worms. I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.
His reaction was so nonplussed I wasn’t sure if he understood it at first, but then he told me “I fell in love with you because you’re a funny skateboarder with a big heart. Not because I thought you were a girl. If your body is going to be different, I’m gonna have to get used to it because I love you. I want you to be happy, and if you’d be happier as a boy that’s how I want to love you.” His unconditional love became my pillar of strength in troubled times.
I graduated and had to fight to stay afloat financially. I worked my butt off trying to find stability on my own. I had ten jobs in 2018, and I was usually so busy working that I didn’t have the energy or time to skate. It was harder to make time for skating. I feared I had fallen off, that this was the turning point in adulthood where I would say to strangers in public “Can I see your board? I used to skate.”
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But the guardian angels of skateboarding intervened. Late 2018 I got cast as a skater for the background of an episode of The Santa Clarita Diet. I had to have my own pads and helmet, so I went to the closest bike store and got a pink helmet and these crazy red, blue, and yellow knee pads, the only ones in the store that would fit me. Once I got on set my, fear of being a poser was back and stronger than ever. And I feared being misgendered as much as being called a poser. Surrounded by highly skilled skaters, I was paralyzed, but then someone came up to me and said, “Those pads are old school as fuck, dude,” and gave me a high five. My nervousness transformed into hype. Somebody there taught me how to do a pop shove-it. I was the only person who brought a tool, so everyone wanted to be my friend. That whole day of shooting in the hot sun at the Santa Clarita skatepark was as if a group of old friends had finally reunited to skate after years of separation. At long last, I felt like a regular guy at the park. That day gave me the courage to skate at parks again, even if a few people were already there.
The other day my buddy saw all my skateboards in my trunk and asked me to teach him to skate. He’s twenty two, and a long time ago I may have said it was too late for him, but I set him up with one of my boards right away. I showed him the exercises I used to use to teach my high school buddies to push. He wasn’t afraid of falling off, and he seemed to have a natural sense of balance.
Coaching and watching him find his footing, I noticed a bad habit most brand new skaters have: he pushed mongo.
“Bro, you see how you keep your back foot on the board? That’s mongo. You should try the other way.” I demonstrated the correct form.
“Is it bad to push mongo?” Isaiah asked me. He attempted to push with his back foot and instantly was thrown off balance.
After 10 years spent in fear of poser-dom I said something I never thought I’d say.
“It doesn’t matter really. If it’s easier for you, do it.” He continued in his natural state, and I was happy in the thought that soon we’d be bombing hills together.
That was the turning point for me. I realized in that moment that there is no such thing as a poser. If you push and you roll forward you’re skating correctly. What you wear changes nothing about the physics of skateboarding. The concept of the cool skater versus the poser is as dead as rigid gender roles. There isn’t a right way to be. If you ride a thing with four wheels and it makes you happy, you’re a real skateboarder. If you only bust out your board once a year on vacation you’re a skateboarder. If you just longboard to get to class you’re a skateboarder. If you’ve never done a single trick in your life you’re a skateboarder. There is no right way to do this. Everyone falls down. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The only things about skateboarding that matter are that it makes you happy and it connects you to the world of skateboarding. The tide is turning. If you’re scared to start because you’re different or unskilled, don’t be. The demographic is more colorful than it ever has been; different skills and styles of skateboarding are just another level of that diversity.
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Cruiser board photos by Lee Barrow, other photos courtesy of author.
Follow Bitty on Instagram (@bittysaurus).
