The Lost Boys

The railing looked too long and too slick to be made, if I'm being honest But, shoe company videos being what they are, here comes our slo-mo. hi-res action hero straight out of the amateur ranks and into the pro spotlight in the halo of a generator light. I watch him slide the thing frontsIde in the sterility of a glossy nightshoot environment, and as he lands, hands momentarily palm down because he feels slipout—he gives a stunned. pleading. off-camera look: Was that good enough? Don’t make me do it again. 

You see, I'd seen that look before, and it came right back to me then. 

Let me tell you about Theresa McKay. She was the size of Kyle Minogue and her breasts and pelvic girdle had spread agreeably in the first flush of womanhood. She wore her luxuriant, flame-red hair in a sensuous way that only some women can. The smile was both pure and suggestive as the notion took her. She was as Irish as whiskey, and I wanted to do the wild thing with her something shocking. 

So, anyway. after endless groundwork, I had touched for her at a disco to Queens University Student Union one night many moons ago (I say ’disco': it was a lunch hall with the tables pushed back, but you take your thrills where you can find them in Belfast). 

We had seen each other a couple of times, and I thought It might be a good time to get her back to the flat for her tea and a couple of drinks. She was five-foot-nothing, so it would be spilling out her ears if she had more than two pints. It just could not fail. We turned off the main street and down into the terraced row where I lived. The story I was tolling was witty with a hint of blue as we rounded the path and opened the door. In the living room, my flat-mate John was watching a video in which an East European drug addict was doing something unspeakable to an Irish Wolfhound. 

He made no attempt to turn It of as we came in. 

Now: I don't know If you've ever seen the life literally drain from someone's face. but Cara looked like her faith In humanity evaporated in that second. She almost staggered. John explained that you'd really need to see it in the context of the lesbian scene beforehand, and went for the rewind. Cara went for the door. I shot John a murderous look, but he just winked. I went after her. She had made it a couple of doors before she doubled up, her hands on her knees, dry retching and gasping for air. There was no way back; I never saw her again. 

Nothing for it but to open a can and see if John was right about the context. 

There was a part in that proceeding scene where one of the girls slips off a PVC sofa and darts that same look to someone off-set. 

It said Should I keep going? Is it over?Are you angry? and you could read the silent reply in her face: Don't look around. Act natural. Don't spoil the illusion that you do this all the time. 

The same thing the skater reads in the faces of his entourage. 

Videos, thankfully, are not like real life, although their purpose is to have you believe they are. A filming environment is nothing like skating started out for any of us. I was once at a photo-shoot near a road with another twenty spectators, when the fllmers asked someone stopping the boards If he could move "because the lens was picking him up." 

I wondered what was wrong with the idea that there might be people watching. The reason, I concluded, is that onlookers spoil the myth that this is a voyeuristic intrusion on some natural act, like Attenborough watching dingos copulate. The skating being beamed into your living room may not be as natural as you think. It may be contrived and engineered for the purposes of making you believe that the handsome kid with no spots lives in a never-never land of bleached walls. blue skies and no smog or drug addiction. Is that a fair representation of any real person's day-to-day experience of skateboarding? 

One conclusion of the pornography industry was that as a result of the adrenalin dimension of their work, the concentration span of an increased heartbeat could be refined into a series of images. 

Not, they contended, of chase but the catch: the denouement: the money shot. The idea was that with crisp editing and endless footage. the thrill just kept coming. In fact it Is an oddly anaesthetic experience. devoid of human context: a great joy reduced to mere mechanics. That genre of skateboarding that continually tries to push the envelope of shock value loses the subtext of warmth and fun it should carry. It Is the unreal and contrived trying to pass itself off as genuine and organic. So be wary. 

Otherwise. we are reduced to viewing the sterile. controlled environment of a big budget media blitz that tries to seem low and funky and real. And the victims in all this are the brand new hammers trying to come up. Like pornography, they are given enough of what turns them on to keep them involved, but often not quite enough money to get out of the game altogether. should they want to. He told me: "Look. I gotta do something crazy. I've got a photographer from X and a Miner from Y here.” 

Staring down the barrel of a gun. 

How badly do you want it? 

God knows, I love the fact that skateboarding draws from all walks of life. What we have is a democratic medium, a leveller. It doesn't ask you whether you're from On Air or of barrio, so long as you come correct. Ugly people skateboard. What has been giving me pause. though, is the spectre of unwell-looking kids being invited to kill themselves beautifully for the delectation of the baying public and our seemingly insatiable appetite for teenage slaughterhouse skateboarding. Only an idiot would fail to recognise that in the open house of professional skating (and I make no distinction between pros and burgeoning ams now, because what is more beautiful than the first bloom of a dizzying talent, heady and fearless?), there is worrying room for exploitation. 

The lifestyle is changeable and opaque. 

You get paid to take fun seriously, but you can't do that, or there, because it's already been done switch by someone you've never heard of. Momentum comes in rolls, now, and if you ride your wave the world can be yours. But the very fact that skating seeks out the damaged. the dreamers, the misfits and the escapists from average, unhappy society means that the capacity for derailment is exacerbated. Surely. 

Those niggling, baby problems brought with them from their shaky backgrounds are allowed to billow through total freedom, fast money and tour boredom. On the sudden swell that they ride—a cover here. a breathtakingly original line at a virgin spot there—some of them are losing their footing. Who is helping them? Their friends? Well, they're getting concerned, but they see so little of them now. Someone saw him last week though, said he looked fucked. Their family? 

Well, he’s doing what he always wanted but we only get the odd postcard now. 

Their sponsors? And do what? Pull them from touring when they're not even hurt? We've got a video to promote. Do you know how much money I waste waiting for him to get out of bed in the afternoon so I can chauffeur him around and attend to his ‘Mummy didn't love me' whims? 

With the million dollar set-pieces on the rail that matches the T-shirt, this will one day end in a casualty room with two affluent grown men and a teenager in a coma with a twenty-five-stair story to tell. The subtext of this is, I know, that the game is passing me by- but l say it anyway: The titillation of Faces of Death-style macabre skate-boarding is going to end badly. 

I don't want to watch through my fingers. 

All I'm saying is that some of those kids don't look well. 

Theresa is currently Head of Clinical Psychiatry at one of the country's leading teaching hospitals. 

I like to think that in my own way, I helped her down that path. 

John is currently a teacher who cries when he sees Presley's final concert.

*this feature originally ran in Sidewalk Magazine