Dropping In

“In the final analysis, truth always evolves from the state of total madness.”

– C.R. Stecyk III, DogTown: The Legend of the Z-Boys

Innovation, like inspiration, is often found in the most unexpected places. On one particular day in the 1970s, as the glaring heat beat down on a drought-stricken Southern California, a group of boys gathered at the edge of an emptied swimming pool with their skateboards in tow and in doing so forever altered the history of skateboarding. Dogtown and Z-Boys, a 2001 documentary film, charts the story of a collective that came from the economically depressed beachside towns of Santa Monica and Venice to redefine skateboarding through their distinctive style. Repudiating the rigid, almost puritanical standards of the skateboarding competitions of the era, the teenagers, who became known as the Z-Boys for their association with the Zephyr Surf Shop, cultivated a new and unruly aesthetic that combined their experiences of surfing the perilous ruins of a decaying pier with their unflinching dedication to experimentation and strong regional identity. It was an exercise in defying convention and expectation, a style mediated on impulsivity, aggression, and the immediacy of youth. It was a style that turned the marginal and maligned into something respected and revered. 

Congregating in concrete wastelands, in the sloped asphalt of area schools and the drought-emptied pools of their more affluent neighbors, the Z-Boys perfected a style based on the smooth, seamless movements of surfing, riding the asphalt as if it was water. The style, as cultivated by Z-Boy members such as Tony Alva and Jay Adams, highlighted the beauty of the harsh, forgotten spaces, transforming them, in an anarchic act of creation, into something wholly new.

Some 40 years after the innovations of the Z-Boys, as I turned 20, I began to explore my own aggression, the contours of my own destruction, the limitations and endurance of my own self-loathing. I, along with many others, spent long, empty days on the outdoor couches of neighborhood party houses; couches steeped in the mustiness of spilled beer, stale cigarette smoke, and the unrelenting rain. As the bottles lined up at our feet, we cultivated a feigned camaraderie, a shared pride in our dissipation. As we sat on these couches, our facade of cruel indifference bloomed. We celebrated a calculated aloofness, so clearly a holdover of adolescent nihilism, and mistook our cynicism for sophistication.

Come night, word of mouth led me to a party, a show, a reading, a venue, or someone’s basement. The location didn’t matter. The event was irrelevant. My large suede shoulder bag took on the overwhelming weight of cheap beer and even cheaper whiskey. My life had been reduced to this routine, played out in an endless repetitive chaos. As time went on, I became increasingly erratic. I began to stumble through my nights, my mood shifting wildly from loud enthusiasm to sullen depression, to the kind of explosive immature anger that led me to yell and break bottles on the sidewalk, making a spectacle of an unarticulated pain, an unarticulated panic. I was careless, reckless, mired in unexpected self-doubt, and brazenly flaunting the vulnerability of my body. I dared the world to meet me with all of its varied indignities, and believed that I had attained a kind of power in doing so. 

I began by testing the boundaries and confines of my previously sheltered existence, and had found myself here; confused, lonely, so far removed from myself that I could only access the fear, anger, and anxiety I felt in drunken rage and confusion. I would find comfort in telling myself that my behavior was nothing to be worried about, as if repeating it enough would make it true. But it was unsustainable. I was suffering. I still have scars on my body from falling. Someone told me that my eyes were dead. Men acted as if they were entitled to my body. Blackouts were not irregular, and as I steadily began to lose control, alcohol was always there to numb the deep wells of embarrassment I felt at the increasingly regular moments of overwrought emotion. 

And then, suddenly, it was no longer enough. I had spent three years of my life believing that through all of this, I was gaining something—perception, maybe, the awe or mutual respect of the dissipated, or a power in condemning the world’s chaos, fighting it by creating my own. It was reasoning based on reaction and it was flawed and meaningless. After three years I began to reckon with the realities, because the realities were finally too hard to ignore. I was lonely. I was exhausted. I felt empty. This part of my life was over, I needed it to be over. So, I began the convoluted process of stepping away from this cycle that I had so lovingly cultivated. 

But in coming to terms with how bad a thing is for you, you are forced to confront the part of yourself that willed it, that wished for it deeply; that darker part of yourself that was only satisfied by your own pain. Rather than accepting or empathizing with this part of myself, I saw it as proof of my instability. I began to distrust myself. I believed that I should be afraid of this former self, this girl reveling in her own agony and thinking it signaled some noble purpose. She was lurking somewhere inside of me and loss of control felt inescapable. 

I became fiercely protective of myself. I cut out what I thought would lead to emotional extremes, isolating myself, becoming inundated with the mediocrity of daily life and daily tasks. I shut off the parts of myself that I felt had led me to this place of chaos and destruction. Seeing boredom and stability as the same thing, as a kind of salvation, I cut myself off from my youth. But in shutting out this part of myself, I was also ignoring that ever-present youthful feeling of possibility, the feeling that you are boundless and the world is open and ready for your imprint.

Youth comes with a frightening immediacy and vastness of possibility. It is a time when navigation and identity are uncertain; our footing, by turns, unpredictable and exhilarating. It is a time when failure doesn’t yet seem like an inevitability, a time for fearlessly devouring the world around you, of searching for aesthetic answers for a confounding existence—a process of endless interrogation and constant revision. 

I watched Dogtown and Z-Boys recently, and in the footage of the Z-Boys skating, in the immediacy infusing their every movement, I saw that vastness, and I remembered it in myself. I remembered how I loved that feeling so much that I almost worshiped it. And I remembered how much it scared me, how I tried to make it smaller, tried to make my desires smaller. I relished art and wanted to imitate the people I idolized, people like Patti Smith and Anaïs Nin, people whose work melded lyricism and darkness, who spoke to the beguiling nature of language and art, and who experimented with genre and form, confounding the limitations of each. What drew me to Smith and Nin were the things that would later draw me to the Z-Boys. But as awed as I was, I was equally terrified of the vulnerability that such an act of creation necessitated. I sought out that feeling of vastness in other ways, ways meant to drown out the anger I felt towards myself. I drank, and I made myself even smaller. 

As I watched the footage of Jay Adams and Tony Alva and their compatriots I began to feel full, sated. It was their physical movement, their seemingly incongruous pairing of confrontation and commitment to aesthetics, that resonated in me so profoundly. It was the melding of chaos and grace, of lyrical, almost balletic gestures, and the cynicism of adolescence that reminded me of my younger self. It was in their every gesture, as they crouched low on their boards, touching the pavement and pivoting around their hands; as they rode pools, pushing up towards the coping and grinding on it until their wheels left the confines of the pool—the origins of vertical skateboarding. In all of this, their bodies instinctively searching for some greater aesthetic symmetry and purpose, fluidity in every gesture, I realized that they were doing what all good art is supposed to do. 

Art reaches out to you; it brings you back to yourself. It reconnects you with the world. It propels you towards your life, offering inspiration and solace. Art meets you where you are; it gives you a piece of yourself, the piece wrenched from you by time, trauma, or circumstance. It puts you back together. It makes sense out of chaos. And that is what I saw. I began to see the parts of myself that I had chosen to ignore, the parts of myself that I had buried deep, the parts that I missed desperately. I saw in Adams and Alva the ferocity and determination of youth. Reflected in their skating was the fearlessness of new ideas, of becoming and knowing yourself, of your ambitions. It is, they seemed to be saying with every movement, the fearlessness that fuels you. And I instantly knew that that tenacity, that impulsivity of creation, was the thing that I had craved.

When I was 20, I had the same aggression that the Z-Boys had; I just used it to different ends. I turned it inside, against myself. I made it massive, an all-consuming force, a real-life manifestation of my pain. Now, I was facing that aggression again, and realizing that it now meant something different. As I watched the Z-Boys, I realized that ferocity is not danger; it is power, it can be the impetus for creation, it can build you up and bind you together. And that is the person I want to be — the person with that kind of ferocity, that kind of self-assuredness. 

In Dogtown and Z-Boys, the now-older men who made up the Zephyr team reminisce on their younger selves, seeing the tension, chaos, and tribulations of youth not with empty nostalgia but with a refreshing mix of frankness and boastful amusement. It is the kind of wisdom that comes from a lifetime of missteps and course corrections, from a profoundly complicated route. Integrated into the film’s very fabric was the acknowledgment of the frustrations of a young life, of lives that took unexpected directions, that were complex and momentarily overwhelmed. But no matter the complication, the men always returned to the thing that drove them, that offered solace, and had defined their lives. 

It was in the aged Z-Boys’ words that I saw hope. Engaging with the past, the documentary appeared to say, was a transformative act, a way to regain some of that drive and intimate knowledge of the self. It made me think of my younger self, but instead of dismissing her, forcing her to dissolve into the rigid daily tasks of a mundane life, I realized that I wanted to nurture her. I wanted to remember her. I wanted to dream about creativity and possibility the way that she had. I had been so awed and afraid of that impulse towards creation that I tried to destroy it, to destroy that part of myself. 

I am now a decade older than that girl who boastfully teetered on the edge, and I now know that self-destruction is not unique; it does not serve some mythic purpose, as all the stories allege. It is not some form of deranged creation. I want to expand in all directions, to be fulfilled in the way that I never was then, but that requires that youthful self, that part of me that embraced inner revolutions, impulse, and earnestness. The younger version of me that fell over herself and drank in desperation, is also the part of me that knows and accepts the impulsivity of creation and the power of vulnerability. She is not only reckless and dangerous, but she also encapsulates possibility, the fearlessness of being, the fearlessness of inspiration. And, much as inspiration and innovation come from the most unexpected sources, so too does healing, that confounding and circuitous process that I hadn’t known or accepted that I needed. Seeing the immensity of the Z-Boys, their unfaltering dedication to unruliness and their aesthetic aggression from their vantage point as older men, I saw, for the first time in years, the part of myself that I had confined to sullen rebellion. I saw her clearly and I began to trust myself again. ▩