Late winter, 2016, the city of Philadelphia razed Love Park, an iconic skateboarding spot in the metro area, and a place where homeless, wandering hearts, and vulnerable folks found a spot to sit or sleep for a while, and where tourists took pictures in front of the LOVE sign. Skaters came for the marble and granite ledges streaked with wax melted and rubbed smooth, and chipped out by BMX riders. It was a meeting place for everyone, one responsible for the start of a thousand stories and more.
My first day at Love was the weekend before the first dozer pushed through the ledges, and leveled the fountain. It was around 20 degrees when my friend Macauley and I parked the car he’d borrowed from his mom, and skated over to the fountain. We both lived in Brooklyn, and neither of us owned a car. The sky was spitting snow when we’d arrived at the city outskirts, so we’d warmed up our legs at the FDR park, a skater-made park under a bridge outside the metro area, and sort of out of the weather. Most everything was bigger than what we were used to, and I don’t remember having much feeling in my hands the whole time. There was wind, too, of course.
There was at least a hundred skaters at Love at first, more showing as time went on. People lined up to make a runway for skaters, one at a time, to push down and try for a trick down the fountain gap before it was gone. For the skaters pushing down the runway, it was easy to see that the entire universe was contained between the row of long hair, stained pants, layers of jackets. The fountain was a tough gap to clear, one because it was fairly long and low, and also because it was made of a few long steps, the last of which blocked your view of where you’d land, so the landing doesn’t really come into view until it’s time to land the trick after hopefully still having the board on your feet. In my experience, you never really see the landing on those types of gaps. There’s a sort of blackout in the air once you commit to the trick, and feel like you’ve caught the board. Then it’s either a flawless roll away, a slip out, or a slam. Most people didn’t seem to achieve the first one right away, if ever. I would have been lucky to ollie it when I was 20, frontside 180 if I was having a really good day.
Macauley wasn’t there to jump down the gap, and nor was I. We just wanted to push around, and say our goodbyes by doing what we did. The cold continued into the mid teens, and apocalyptic, burning trash cans with skaters and vagabonds huddled around them materialized. The cops didn’t bother anyone this time. The city was ready to turn it into a green space, go figure.
We called it good for the night on skating, and found a strip of small stores and restaurants to pop in and out of, buying a comic, eating a pizza, feeling the nuances that make Philly different than NYC. Macauley bought his partner a comic that he thought she’d like, and I’m sure she did. He shared a thoughtful comment on why he was buying it. My favorite couple.
We retrieved the car and headed back towards NY, slated for around a midnight arrival, and started our way there by getting to NJ first, so we could cross the bridge into Manhattan, and I could take the train back to Brooklyn.
The return route took us over a long, seemingly endless hill, like we were completing a full circle on a David Lynch film set. An industrial zone outside Elizabeth, NJ to our left pumped out smoke, and the light pollution from the city brought it to light, along with the dimmed street lamps that just seem taller out there. The industrial clouds dissipated to the east, but it was clear as to where they materialized, hovering in our forward vision through the windshield as we climbed. Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” a nearly 14 minute track, had been playing for a while, nearly to completion, and we’d not spoken while it played. The track, the evening’s happenings, our friendship, proximity to the greatest city on earth—a lot of complex things that make a moment—created a feeling in the car that you can’t buy. We crested the hill, the song ended, and I was trying to figure out what to say to ensure somehow that I wasn’t alone in my feeling. Macauley said, “Did you feel that?”
When I’m getting to know people, typically romantic interests, they’ll ask me something like this, or I to them first, if they want to share any special moments, or unique things that have happened to me, and I’ll typically share a heavily clipped version of this story. Usually, I’ll just jump to the end. I’m not sure that any of them have really gotten it, and that’s partly due to my rushing through it, and the context of it all.
A little over a year later, I think it was, Macauley and his partner moved to Bangkok for the better part of the next two years. I think he read some David Foster Wallace, and many others, as he did, and I’m sure he does. I didn’t read Wallace until a couple of years later. He kept skating, and I’m sure befriending someone wherever he went. They visited NY, but I’d left for my first long distance hike the month or so before they arrived. I returned to NY after my hike, and he was gone again. We haven’t managed to be there at the same time since.
This memory, for one reason or another, came to me after a poor night’s sleep last night, when I was sitting at my desk at my modest job in Colorado, unable to write it down, where I’m living in my truck, trying to save for some medical care, student loans unless they’re ever forgiven, gas to go the mountains and run shirtless, and hopefully to have some semblance of an emergency fund. I’ve got a lot of hope this year, and I think when the Coltrane catalyst episode happened, I was full of it then, too.
Trey French 