Skate Rat

Being a skate rat in a small Southern town meant praticing forty-three shove-its to pop-it/ frontside axle stalls on curbsides in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. It also meant seemingly endless summer days skating from spot to spot - convenience store to Dairy Queen to other convenience store to video store - wherever you could skate but also talk to people who were as bored as you, but who were nonetheless getting paid for their boredom. So I got to know the town pretty well, and all these cashiers and small business owners got to know me pretty well, too.

Sometimes I'd walk right into the police station (this was before they got so bored that they declared war on skateboarding) and talk to Willie, a police sergeant I'd known since I was a kid, or Joel, whose daughter I knew from school. They were cool cops.

Often, I'd skate to the video store, Prime Time Video, where an older kid named Todd worked. Cool as hell, Todd would often comp me video rentals. And I'd draw him dumb comics. (And strangely, my ability to draw hasn't improved much since then.) It wasn't an "exchange" - just how we each decided to pass the time in a place where time still passes very slowly indeed.