…because I suck at it. Seriously. I know that a game of s.k.a.t.e. is just something fun to do as the session cools down, but even so, it’s really embarrassing when I can’t do the most obvious trick.

This trick is invariably the kickflip.

I cringe when the first skater steps on his board, pushes once or twice, and pops and catches a kickflip as easily as an ollie up a curb. This is a warm-up trick for everybody else, but for me, it’s been my biggest fear.

Don’t get me wrong, flip tricks don’t freak me out; I can do my fair share of them — so long as they’re heelflip-oriented. I also don’t know the difference usually between backside and frontside. I mean, I do, I just get confused. This is another source of derision for others. Let me also describe my one-inch-high nollies and switch ollies. Nevermind the fact I ollie fire hydrants and once, even a waist-high bike rack. If I can’t nollie kickflip, switch shove-it, or just plain tre-flip, fuck it, says the consensus.

And even though I’m not fond of excuses, here I go:

I’ve always skated alone.

You’d think I would have come to terms with this; I mean, I did start skating at the loneliest time ever, 1993, but I haven’t. Because I’ve never had anybody else to riff off of, I’ve never forced myself to learn the apparently requisite tricks. When I learned frontside five-0s, I didn’t have a skate buddy to be like, “you should learn that backside!” If I couldn’t get a new trick in a couple solo sessions, who was there to give me a hard time when I abandoned it for something else? This is how I explain my being able to stomp bolts on fakie heelflips on bolts without able to kickflip; or how I can fifty-fifty waist-high ledges but only this year learned how to backside grind curbs. Whenever I skated, I would jog through the tricks I’ve taught myself (well, I owe some credit to Thrasher’s How To Skateboard Better video, I guess, even though all the pros who explained tricks seemed like they’d be dicks to me if we ever met in real life). After I’ve gone through everything, I either find something new to stomp a staple trick on, or I half-heartedly throw around tre flips, knowing full-well I don’t have the guts to do more than catch it with one foot.

I like doing basic tricks, like the ones described in How To: frontside and backside ollies, 50-50s, 5-0s, tailslides, lipslides, and so on. I like them fast and clean and on ledges. I like wooden bus stop benches best, but on the off-chance I skate with someone, they never want to skate them. Ugh. Wood is just…weird.

When I started buying skate videos from CCS, like every other sad sob who didn’t live near a skateshop, it was seriously How To and Welcome to Hell that really got me hyped. I think these videos came out in 1995 or 1996, and from what I could tell from them, there was a conscious effort to clean up street skating. No more triple flips down two-stairs or sloppy, roll-a-foot-a-minute switch hard-flips. I remember a 411 where Ricky Oyola skates around City Hall in Philadelphia with a microphone clipped to his collar, barging through traffic, ollying up five stairs, doing wall rides and back tails, all the while explaining how rad it was to skate Philly. I don’t think Ricky O. ever skated alone. While I’m thinking of rad skaters who were about cleanliness and proficiency: Matt Reason, Surge Trudnowski, Vern Laird, mid-’90s Josh Kalis and Elissa Steamer, who I now see every week somewhere. I always want to say hi, but what’s the point.

A skater I really felt a kinship with was Micah Mattson, an early Zero skater; he had an awesome part in a long-forgotten 411 that blew me away. He skated to a Misfits song, “Halloween,” and that was the first time I ever heard of them (I’m an only child; I’m so jealous of people who had cool older brothers and sisters who turned them onto rad shit like the Misfits when they were, like, eight). Anyway, so Micah skated really fast and really big, and while I’ve never ollied anything more than a six-stair, it was the way he worked with basic tricks that was so awesome. His part has long-been hazy in my mind, but I remember super fast, fuck-off 50-50s and 5-0s on these tall, chunky concrete ledges. A lot of his part was filmed at night, and he was the first person I ever saw wear Dickies beyond Ed Templeton, whose ads scared me. His curtain trick is this ollie down a ridiculous wall that’s at an 85 degree slant to the sidewalk below. This is a one-time, make it or break it type of thing. Micah rolls up and pops this super clean ollie down the embankment, clears it but lands wrong and snaps his board and smacks his head. Cut to an silhouetted image of Micah, framed by a sunset, rolling down a hill. Voice-over: “I love music and I love skateboarding.”

I don’t know whatever happened to Micah Mattson, but I have the feeling he usually skated alone, too.

Okay so people think I hate things. I guess that’s why my blogger name is Henry “the Hater”, even though my friends know I just got a lot of hard-love. That’s why I’ve gotten straight blackballed in the skate industry, but that’s just because I call things out the way they are.

So we can better get to know each other, I didn’t go skating today like Wilt (shoulder’s still recovering). Although it doesn’t mean anything, my first board was a fucking Hosoi, a pair of Indys, and green Slimeballs. I don’t want to give away too much about my age because I’ve got an arrest warrant out for skipping out on court dates for skateboarding shit, but just know this: I’m not a crusty-ass hessian, and I’m not a Huf-hat wearing fixie rider. I fucking crack up whenever I see a skater wearing a Huf hat. Don’t you know “H” on a hat means “Hipster fixie rider” as much as it means “Hyphy”? It hardly means Hufnagel anymore. I’m old enough to know Henry Sanchez is the O.G. “Henry the Hater.”

He’s the only dude I won’t hate on.

But here’re some things I will:

1.) Skaters wearing American Apparel hoodies (fuck back to Haight Street, scenester).

2.) Skaters wearing SB Dunks (I got this shirt I bought that says “SBs Are Like Assholes, Everybody’s Got ‘Em.”

3.) New kids who visit/move to the City who bum rush DLX/FTC (the only skateshops they know about) and ask the store clerk, “hey dude, do you know where any spots are?”

4.) The store clerks who actually give these retards directions (unless they’re intentionally wrong and all the arrows and marks create a huge splooging cock).

5.) Shitty, really shitty Plan B graphics. C’mon, dude! And you got that fucktard Ryan Sheckler? Way to shit on your legacy, Plan B.

6.) Vans for not hooking up Mission Skate Shop with an account (like, yeah, right, Vans is such a fucking core indie co. when they can’t hook up some O.G.s wanting to open a store.

7.) Vox for copying Vans, which makes their scooping up all the rad pros that Vans dumped a mute point.

8.) I-Path for being way too the fuck poofy to skate in.

10.) DC for their pinky-rang-wearing teamriders.

Okay. So those are some easy targets to get out of the way. Expect things to get a lot more constructive in posts to come.

psyche.

…It was kind of a day off, so I woke up late. After making coffee, and then some more coffee, I skipped my usual breakfast of bacon and eggs. If I got shaky from hunger, I figured, standing with my board in my kitchen next to my yowling cat, I could always stop somewhere and get a burrito. The important thing was that I get skating.

So I did.

I locked the door, walked down the stoop, put my board until my foot and rolled down the sidewalk. There’s this great little curb tranny-thing in front of our driveway, and I do a little backslide slash down it, rolling and powersliding down the smooth side of the street until I get to Bucchanan, where I make a sharp right up the hill and start pushing. Hard. I pass Page and the projects and swerve onto Haight Street. I’m usually still a little stiff and cold, so I resign myself to do little more than those backside slashes over metal street grates and little curb cuts. Two blocks later, streaming along the yellow median, and I push by a passing 6-Parnassus and shove down Fillmore. The asphalt’s nice and rough but I got big 55 mm Spitfires, so I push all the way down the hill past the sneakerheads smoking in front of Upper Playground, through the Waller intersection, hopping up on sidewalks, trying to manual city blocks past hipster hair boutiques and coffee shops and usually getting messed up by a crack or a pedestrian or something. I mash down to Duboce where the MUNI trains run, and hopping over the tracks, I start pushing hard on the crusty, Fred Gall asphalt because I’m coming up on a forty-foot-long manny pad, punctuated by this nice, thick cracks, which means you gotta readjust your manual every five feet. It’s way more intensive than you average manual on a pad, and what adds to the fun are the twenty-some MUNI users, waiting for their train, who have nothing better do to than watch me try to impress them. But really, I’m not trying to impress anyone; I’m just trying to get from point A to point C, via manny spot B, so I don’t let it bother me when my tail starts dragging with, like, five feet from the end. I level out my nose and try my luck on the manny pad around the corner, punctuated by even more cracks, on Church Street by the Safeway.

CRK!-cccccccccc-CRK!ccccccccccc-CRK!ccccccccccc-CRK!

This is what happens when I live in San Francisco and I don’t know anyone.

I.

Skate.

Alone.

asdfaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

It seems to me that the best way to introduce myself is to describe my introduction to skateboarding.

I was born in 1983 in Burnsville, a suburb of Minneapolis. By the time I was six or seven, I’m pretty sure I’d completely thrashed my VHS of Back to the Future. And sure, while I acknowledged how cool Michael J. Fox looked skitching on that pick-up truck as he waved to his girlfriend (was she teaching an aerobics class?), the movie wasn’t the catalyst for my wanting to skateboard. Instead, I owe the favor to the two older neighborhood kids who would jam down Blue Bill Bay Road, the sloping street my family and I lived on, rocking jean jackets, Converse high-tops, and chain wallets. I can still remember how the crush of their wheels on the rough asphalt excited me. If was ever putsying around out front on my little red Schwinn I would invariably skid to a halt and watch those two budding hessians thrash down the street.

On my next birthday I got my wish: a trip to Children’s Palace in the Burnsville Center where my mom bought me my complete skateboard: a Nash. It was really 80s with its neon-colored wheels and trucks (made of plastic!) and the gnarly graphic: a Hawai’ian volcano spewing lava. The word “Kona” rounded out the image as it it was the name of a pro. This probably happened in 1989 or ‘90, so the board had zero-concave, and, epicly enough, came with bolted-on rails, a nose cap, and a plastic brake-pad on its flat-edge tail.

I was hyped.

(I google-imaged my old Kona Nash board, but this is the closest skateboard I found: a 1986 model some dude from North Dakota is selling on ebay for $7 [+$12.00 for shipping]. Keep tabs; there’s only one bid so far.)

Most kids start off butt-boarding down their drive-ways, and while I’m sure I did that a few times, I always knew it was lame. After padding up in matching neon orange pads and bike helmet, I immediately began bombing our steepish little driveway. It took a while before I got the hang of turning (my dad had the insight to loosen my kingpin nuts so that my–what, 50 pound frame?–could make the plastic hangers groove in their pivot cups), but soon enough I was able to make it to the bottom. I’m not sure how deep I was into shredding when I decided to forgo putting on my pads and, pushing down the driveway, hit a rock and slammed hard on my right elbow. I was hysterical as I glimpsed the peeled skin and the dripping blood–my mom was gonna kill me! To this day I still have the scar, which I can make out behind much more recent scrapes and scars. What’s funny is how the rough red patch has migrated about an inch or two toward my hand; weird evidence of how our skin accommodates a then-constantly growing frame. I rub the spot and it’s sore; the recent result of an embarrassing slam while learning to properly power slide down Haight Street.

My mom would’ve killed me.

pfmadsen

I moved to San Francisco during the summer of 2007, after graduating from the University of Iowa. There I got a b.a. in journalism. I skated a lot and helped out at my buddy Mitch’s skate shop The Full Kit. Since leaving the U of Iowa, I’ve worked as a contributing writer/critic for Chicago-based Ground Lift magazine until I got too fed up writing for free. After a few months in San Francisco, I’ve serendipitously ran into the right people at bars, and I’ve weaseled my way into Thrasher, where I have two interviews (with Novia Scotian rapper Buck 65 and the Danish pop group the Raveonettes) forthcoming. The Buck article should run any issue now, while the ‘Nettes should appear this summer. I also write little music blurbs for the local newspaper the SF Weekly. I’m looking into some skateboard-related issues for the “Sucka Free City” section of the weekly regarding the bullshit traffic code and the red-tape that’s so far barring much progress on the construction of public skateparks. I skate three or four proper sessions a week, and skate to-and-from my job in the Haight/Ashbury the other days. Life is good for me in San Francisco, if somewhat restricted by the minimum wages I earn slanging purple hoodies to sneakerheads. Lately I’ve been selling all my cds, books, and shoes to afford a shoe-string move to New York City as soon as this May or June. My author photo was an out-take of the four seasons photo spread that my good I.C. buddy Sam McGuire took for the 49th issue of the Skateboard Mag. Check out his awesome blog/life here.

Wilt on Lily

Wilt has lived in San Francisco either all his life or just the last college semester. He’s not telling. Oh– and the “on Lily” biz? Wilt breaks down his address like this: “Lily Street (like the flower), Apartment X (like Malcolm).” Does that make Wilt politically reductive or merely a chump? I asked Wilt, who’s sitting next to me as I write this, sipping on a Gatorade. “Whatever, dude, I don’t even wanna look at what you’re writing about me. I’m sure I’m gonna look like a kook. Sure, you know, I’ve been in SF forever, practically, and I still don’t have a girlfriend, my digital SLR got stolen, I’m still not doing anything, so…just don’t rub it in.” Wilt is one of those guys who you meet and would be totally hyped on, if only he didn’t second-guess everything about himself. He’s like a reluctant peacock with kick-ass feathers but no inclination to show them. “Oh, god, dude. People already think I’m gay the way it is.”

Henry “the Hater”

Henry was one of the first people I met when I moved to San Francisco, and I’m pretty sure I hated him right off the bat. I was smoking a cigarette outside Delirium, four beers into my Thursday night, fucking around on my skateboard. I was having trouble with my flatground. “Yeah! It’s not as easy as it looks!” Henry was standing around the corner from the bar’s entrance, holding a brown-sacked Tall Can and a Zig-Zagger. Lurking. With a sip of his beer he shoved off from the shadow, switched around his board, and popped the cleanest, tallest, Stevie-Williams-slowly-rotating fakie kickflip I’ve ever seen. He caught it under his Cinco de Mayo P-Rods and beemed me as he stomped it down directly onto a crack in the sidewalk, causing him to fall backwards onto his elbows. I heard a pop! and assumed the worst, but as Henry got up he explained he’s fucked up his rotator cuffs (the shoulder/arm socket joint thing) so much they’re constantly cracking; Henry has literal, physical, (calcium) chips in his shoulders. So what does arthritic symptoms as age 25 get you? Qualified for a medicinal marijuana card, that’s what.

Henry doesn’t want his photo on this blog because he says he’s made enough enemies in the industry the way it is. Dude, I told him, this is gonna be a bro-blog, not Epicly Later’d. No one’s gonna read it. Henry has some serious conspiracy theories at work though. A native SF loc born in Parkside, Henry swears he’s been black-listed from Thrasher party photos to the extent that he’s (allegedly) been photo-shopped out of group photos. I told him I doubted anybody anywhere would put that much love and care into hating him, but in typical Henry fashion, he told me I had no idea what I was talking about because I’m from Iowa. “Burnsville,” I correct him. “Yeh? Same dif.”