I don't know why she started talking to me again. I don't know why my stomach went through the floor. I tell myself I'm too old for this. I tell myself a lot of things.
--
Under the lights of Londonderry, some time after midnight. We'd been drinking, so skating was a good idea. I learned to ollie that night, on the sheer plane of the parking lot. Regular stance, left foot behind the screws that hold down the front trucks, ball of my right foot on the tail. Crouch, snap down with the back foot, jump, slide your toes forward along the grip tape, crunch, land. It took me a few hours. I practiced on the grass for awhile.
Someone was taking inches off their tires, blowing out the engine on the second tier of the lot. Their headlights poked out from the guardrails occasionally, going left or right, sending vertical beams of light out into the dusty night, stiff blinds across the mucus-green Save-on-Foods logo. Their tires squealed, the car slid sideways, stopped next to the rail. The driver got out. I didn't have my glasses. He was a white blotch, his features bleached out by the night. We booed. Someone yelled that he was gay.
I skated under the tier, where it was darker, slid in between pillars, around the handful of vehicles left to the night. The wheels buzzed under the cover, changed pitch with a weight-shift. I crouched down, slipped a hand under the deck, leaned. The board tilted, but didn't turn. The trucks are too stiff. They need to be loosened.
A white Tempo roared down the parkade ramp, bottomed out its front end on ground level and stopped. I could see the driver's head snap back and forth, the break lights winking on and off. Someone was in the car with him, laughing. I saw long hair, glasses, a tiny mouth topped by a hooked nose. The brake lights winked out, the car jerked forwards. The car ran the intersection light and turned east onto 137th, revved its engine, and disappeared.
We walked up the ramp to the second tier. The lot lights hung above the mall like beads of amber. We looked out over the city, over the squat buildings, the arterial streets, soft patches of black. Traffic lights winked off and on, oscillating their colours for empty intersections. A squad car drove by, lights flashing, sirens silent.
Someone suggested coffins. We laid our boards down at the top of the ramp, sat on the front side, laid down on our backs. The sky was empty with light pollution. Someone was doing a countdown, rattling off numbers. None of us had done this before. I felt the incline tug at the soles of my shoes.
I imagined rolling down the ramp, feet pointed out in front of me, head arched up over the tail of the board. Halfway down I lean on the board wrong and the deck tilts. The front wheels pop up, and I tumble into the intersection, underneath red lights, underneath the wheels of a car.
The countdown hit zero. I lifted up my feet, and let go.
We did coffins until we were sober.
Sep 30, 2007
on skateboarding, red wine, and cigarettes
Sep 17, 2007
Admittedly I Have Noticed Some Things
Mercedes-Benz kinda reminds me of that Bjork video, All is Full of Love. Not so much because of the lesbian robots as say, the style: the swift angles, sharp corners, and antiseptic colour. In another way it sort of reminds me of a grade-school lesson in geometric shapes; one where the kid next to you stole the brightest crayola markers you had and left you with Midnight Gray and a leaky bottle of white-out.
In keeping with this image, the Benz can be described as empty space and high ceilings surrounded by math: an octagon cut from what I'm sure is the world's finest concrete and tempered glass, latticed and buttressed and reinforced at every conceivable angle with steel beams the colour of TV static. Altogether it looks very otherworldy, or at the very least, foreign. A meteor, perhaps: peculiar in its symmetry, with a pavement crater that had spread from impact like mold.
I am not sure why I think of these things.
I walked inside and stood around looking useless until someone came to see if I was lost.
--
The salesman had a name like Florence Ocean, slick ginger hair and sharp gray eyes. His clothes had a muted look about them, like old technicolor film.
He was talking about electronic stability, power redirection, making little 'tut-tut-tut' sounds and spinning invisible tires in his hands. "We really shouldn't stop for cats and things," he was saying. "Safer for us. But we stop because we're nice, right? This car" --and here he patted the hood of the SMART fortwo, which had the colour and delicate look of a rose petal, or perhaps a lady bug-- "will pick up the slack, make sure we don't hurt ourselves over kitty."
I thought of my own cat dead on the pavement, the fine detail of the treads pressed into his belly. This guy was losing points.
"Care to take it for a spin?" he asked.
I nodded.
"Sure."
--
They brought me a can of soda and a glass full of ice.
"What's the damage?" I asked.
23,496. 287 a month with ten thousand down.
Over how long?
60 terms.
What's the financing rate?
8.3.
That's a little high.
He folded his arms and agreed.
I chewed on ice for awhile, then told him I'd have to pass. We shook hands and I got up to leave.
On my way out I saw a pregnant woman peering into the driver-side of a silver fortwo (black tridion cell, turbo diesel engine, cockpit clock and rev counter extra). She looked like a skewed 6.
And this is what I thought then: that this whole place was made of math. From the right angles in the walls to the graphite loops that fill the bills of sale. A numbers place.
A factory.
And for a moment I saw all of it: accountants and salespersons with solar calculators in their hands; mechanics in the hangar with 3/4" socket wrenches and air impact pneumatics cranked to 100psi; fax machines gobbling up long distance data out of telephone wires and spitting it out with unerring accuracy; even the pale blond hair of the receptionist could be written in hex, fed into a modem, and tossed into the web as kilobytes per second, or the eleventh line in someone's CSS.
There was a connection here. Something tenuous. Something film-worthy. Something like the connection between a rev counter--with it's small, needle-like hands--and the pistons under the trunk; the long bar of the drive shaft and the precise zig-zag of the treads.
I collected my thoughts and left.
--
Footnote: I'm going to sell this to Darren Aronofsky as Pi 2.
