Behold a Great Flying Man

By Kyle Beachy

It’s November 18, 1989, just prior to the crash. The boys—Cab, Lance, Tony, and Mike—have been on a nonstop world tour playing to sold out crowds, with hitherto unthinkable money and fame and worldly temptation raining down upon their young bodies. “At one point,” recalls Tony, the tallest, “I bought a tanning bed.” For as long as skateboarding has existed, contests have been a skater’s only real chance of getting coverage in magazines. Which is to say: the only real way to be known. But now they’ve begun producing these strange and alluring films with no real precedent, and, as it happens, the timing of these Bones Brigade films—“Bones Brigade” is the name the boys have been given by their employer—has coincided with the blazing spread of the VCR into 70% of American homes. Now they travel from town to town like a troupe of famous acrobats in a Marquez novel, long bangs wagging.

And tonight, for some reason, they’ve brought the world premiere of their newest film, Ban This, to St. Louis, Missouri. Why here instead of California, obviously? Nobody seems to know. At the time, we didn’t believe it. Even in the car on the way there, even as we—me and my friends, ages ten and eleven—squeezed into spots on the balcony of the packed theater, even up to the moment that the screen began glowing. At that age, sense is not a currency of great value, but we felt its absence. And then, suddenly, those skeleton fingers tore through the royal blue, and from behind the screen came the skull, twisting as it emerged, cackling morbidly at our unbelievable fortune.

It’s not part of the story, but I should mention that a portal opened up on this senseless night inside the Sheldon Theater. In a thrall, I walked through that portal, and I am writing from the far side of it still.

Anyone who is even a little familiar with skateboarding history has likely become that way due to the work of a surfer turned pro skater turned business owner and filmmaker named Stacy Peralta. After directing seven Bones Brigade films for Powell-Peralta, he left the company in 1991 to work in television. He returned to his skateboard origins in 2001 with the surprise hit documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. That film is an origin of origins—a grand, unified mythology of the skateboard object and its ethos, narrated by Sean Penn. It shined at Sundance, went on to sell over a million copies on DVD, and, speaking technically, rules. He then wrote a ludicrous and self-indulgent fictional account of the same story, Lords of Dogtown. It does not rule at all. In 2012, he returned to documentary with Bones Brigade: An Autobiography.

By then, the success of the Peralta model had birthed a cohort of mythomentaries including: Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator; Who Cares: The Duane Peters Story; Rising Son: The Legend of Skateboarder Christian Hosoi; and Waiting for Lightning. With greater and lesser returns, all of these films rely on archival footage set to unsubtle, period-appropriate music cues to guide emotions and mark clear, narrative beats. It’s all given clear meaning by present-day interviews with aging skateboarders, a few journalists, and at least one celebrity musician. The results tend to go on too long while also leaving out the meatiest details and incriminating specifics of the world as their subjects made it.

Plus skateboarding is a living history, and this can get awkward. Like near the end of The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, when the film’s director and sometimes subject sits hunched in his director’s chair. He issues a heavy sigh and the camera tightens on his shadowed face. “It was coming to an end,” he says. “Wasn’t gonna last. What it was couldn’t be.” By “it,” Peralta means this group of friends—Cab, Lance, Tony, Mike, and also Rodney Mullen, though by 1989 Mullen had left—and his role as their manager. By “it,” he means the boom time of an industry that revolved around a handful of celebrity halfpipe performers. More than anything, he means the story he’s telling. He does not by “it” mean skateboarding, which did not end or die or even crash, really, in 1990. It only transformed, as it’s constantly doing, because skateboarding is a strange, fluctuating bundle of embodied practices and worldly phenomena. Stacy Peralta knows this. He’s just not super-interested in skateboarding.

That portal I walked through on November 19, 1989—let’s call it love. There are any numbers of ways to admire or be impressed by and even to enjoy riding a skateboard. Many ways to be for a time and thenceforth to have been a skater; to carry around remnants of skateboarding shrapnel-like as you move through the world as one of the countless people who used to skate. My friends from that night would spend the next eight years riding skateboards with me, and then they, as just about everyone does, stopped. That is how it goes—people quit and those of us who don’t will find others who haven’t yet quit, and together we’ll form a little community until we or they quit too. A few, after a time, will return. Coming back means pain and frustration and also guaranteed success—all it takes to be a skater is to go out and ride a skateboard. It is, in fact, one of the few portals that we can trust to never close in our absence.

The first words we hear in Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off, directed by Sam Jones, are “Ahawahhhhhhh. Faaahhhhhk. Aaaahhhgh.” The film doesn’t tell us, but it’s June 27, 2016, seventeen years to the day since Tony Hawk landed the first 900 in the history of skateboarding, and he is at his private vert ramp trying a 900. Why attempt such a thing at age 48? For one, because he believes he can. For two and maybe three, because, as he says, “I’m willing to struggle . . . just to figure out how to do it. I never want to back down from a challenge.” This is determination, which is premised on reaching a specific outcome, and also will, a more general drive toward a generally desired end. If you’ve never seen it, I imagine watching Tony Hawk eating shit and screaming into the air will come as a shock. We watch him spin, fall, suffer, then struggle for air as he climbs the ladder back to the deck to do it all again.

And, for the film’s first hour, Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off proceeds, to a note, to mimic the Stacy Peralta project. Gone is the embedded, real-time perspective of Jones’s 2002 Wilco documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. Instead, we begin with childhood footage of a frail, tiny Tony in pads like water wings, face freckled, limbs long and awkward. The old footage is a delight, and some of it new to even the most avid historians. Watching the Chris Miller fall at Upland, for example, might have permanently fucked up my biome. The pleasures are many—it’s soundtracked by hit after hit, and our young hero is presented to us on a platter. Shunned for his technical approach in an era largely defined by style, so victorious does he become, so much winning does he achieve, that he eventually silences his critics. Over and again, Tony’s determination conquers all obstacles in his way. He becomes famous, hitherto unthinkably famous. A challenge arises to reset things, but then: determination. The fame and wealth just keep escalating.

Which, of course, is the reason this story is distributed by HBO. For much of the world, Tony Hawk is skateboarding—more than ambassador, he’s its avatar. The uneasy dynamic of celebrity that plays out on his Twitter feed is, in a sense, skateboarding’s too. How funny, we all seem to agree, that someone so famous has gotten this way by riding a toy on a ramp. It’s perhaps the world’s most inclusive inside joke, and it’s been leveraged into sales for Mini Coopers, McDonald’s fast food, Jeeps, chocolate milk, Subway sandwiches, and most recently, NFTs that allow people to own individual tricks that Tony’s made famous as he retires them. It helps that he’s charming, self-effacing, and generous. It helps that The Skatepark Project, formerly The Tony Hawk Foundation, has awarded more than $10 million to build places for kids to skate. It helps that he so obviously loves riding the toy.

Do we ever wonder why he loves it? Not really. The bulk of Jones’s film, like every movie in the Stacy Peralta extended universe, hems all the transformative and transforming weirdness of skateboarding into the tight, hermetic framework of a famous, flawed, and determined champion of his field. I have been staring at Tony Hawk since 1986, and will attest to something having been implanted inside of me back then, something cardiac or glandular that even today throbs at the sight of his most famous board, dipped pink and screenprinted with the blue cross and original hook-nosed buzzard skull. I probably, in some not terribly oblique ways, love Tony Hawk. And yet my own distaste for skateboard mythology burns proportionally to my belief in skateboarding’s intangibles: those strange rewards that lead people to step through portals and then remain there for as long as they possibly can. These have little to do with fame, competition, or, for the vast majority of us, towering half pipes.

The problem with stories, I am saying, is their commitment to protagonists. The so-called dark times that Jones plays to a string-section dirge, this industrial recession of the early nineties, meant the death of not only vert but also its narrow, competitive model of skateboard heroics. It was in fact a great leveling, a fall that presaged a birth in city plazas and county parking lots of a new form of the activity, one that would eventually grow into the broad and inclusive street skateboarding we see around us today. But that is skateboarding’s story, not Tony Hawk’s.

Late in Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, something compelling claws its way out of Jones’s story. This is after Tony’s 900 and the full loop, after the video games and another rise to hitherto unimagined levels of celebrity, after the fall that comes of his addiction to fame, after we hear vaguely of some kind of treatment in the pat language of baggage, and needing to make a change—and after, inevitably, applying the determination that he’s learned from a lifetime of skateboarding toward his personal growth. On the thirtieth anniversary of the third Bones Brigade film, The Search for Animal Chin, Lance, Mike, Cab, and Tony reunite to recreate an iconic photo. Tony, being Tony, starts cranking 540s over the channel and comes down barely but importantly wrong, leaving him concussed and writhing on the flatbottom. “His hair was like Einsteiny, pitch-white skin,” says Stacy Peralta, who’s scared enough by what he sees to try and organize an intervention. He calls Tony’s friend, then Tony’s wife. He calls Tony’s brother. Stacy believes it’s time for Tony to stop. Jones keeps us here for a time, watching Peralta grow agitated.

Then, quickly, we cut from Stacy’s helpless, darting eyes to Lance, his own eyes searching for a single trunk, even just a branch in what he knows to be a forest of contradiction. Lance, who is not a global celebrity, has had no work done to his face or neck. He looks old. He is old. He sits there silently, then waves a hand like an old person. When Jones presses, he says, “He doesn’t underst-.” It recalls a moment from Bones Brigade: An Autobiography when Lance says, “My general feeling is that skateboarding has nothing to do with competition or sport.” Onto which Stacy, voice fierce behind the camera, pounces: “Then what does it have to do with?” Coming from Stacy Peralta, storyteller, it’s not a real question. Jones, to his credit, is curious. How does Lance, how do Tony and even low-altitude Rodney, how do any of us still on this side of the portal reconcile this matter of loving an activity that is actively destroying us? “It’s something you can’t change,” says Lance. “I can’t sleep on my shoulders. It’s terrible. It’s horrible.”

There. The emergence. And it emerges again from the genius and weirdo Rodney Mullen. “This is the luxury of having spent my life doing what I love,” he says, voice leaden with portent, eyes completely still and almost glowing with the spirit of an old-world man of God. “The cost for that? It sucks.” And oh, the way he dumps this sucks like some bucket of sodden filth.

Does love blind us? Help us see the world more clearly? Let me tell you how I feel my love working these days, because it has nothing to do with determination. A fine curiosity will come over me, often unprompted. I’ll find myself wondering if I could do this specific, meaningless thing with my body and skateboard. Next I will think: I bet I could do that. Couldn’t I? Goodness, it would be cool as hell to do it. And then, having gone to a place where I can attempt this desire that’s arrived from out of the blue, I either will or I will not give it a shot. Sometimes this means devoting hours to the desire and coming away dirty and bloody. Sometimes it means failing, giving up, and coming back again. But, more often, it means I show up and don’t even attempt the thing I imagined. Being there, being confronted with the reality of the place and opportunity to do the thing, reveals a fear that did not exist in the abstract. In these moments, desire and fear weave, as they will, and time tends to collapse.

For Tony Hawk, for Lance and Rodney and any of us who remain on this side of the portal, the love functions as a kind of obvious and unspeakable gratitude. As Rodney says, “I wish—I see all the arguments against it. But I wish I could relate the intangibles to you.” Well, our greatest poets have failed at less.

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