jackassworld

I’ve been around skateboarding a long time now. Not as long as some, to be sure, but still long enough to have seen a few generations of skaters come and go—like guys who are in their thirties now that I first met when they were knee-high 12-year-olds with flutey-flute voices. This can be somewhat disconcerting at times, if only because I don’t particularly care to be reminded of my present age, but it is interesting to see how some have progressed in life throughout the years.

To be a skateboarder and involved in the skate industry is indeed a charmed life. Especially so if you can swing it as a sponsored rider where you can pretty much travel the world and live life on an altogether different wavelength than most everyone else on the planet working toward adulthood. This is an existence par excellence with virtually unlimited freedom, but, as such, it is both blessing and curse with the power to create, corrupt, or some combination thereof. I’ve watched some of these diehard little skate rats grow up to become successful beyond belief (in 1990 I gave these two dirty peckins a ride to an amateur street contest in San Diego, one pipsqueak of which whose name was Rob Dyrdek), while others eventually lost themselves in the idyllic yet so often dangerously idle lifestyle. Drugs, drink, art, rehab, prison, suicide, death…all have tragically happened amid the skateboard pursuit.

In 1995, the Big Brother magazine staff went on a three-week long road trip along the Eastern seaboard of the United States. The primary focus of this “working vacation” of ours was to generate an entire issue’s worth of content (Big Brother #19*), but we’d also brought along World Industries filmer Socrates Leal to document whatever went down along the way for our first attempt at producing a video. During the course of this trip, we stopped in the city of Baltimore to hook up with Bucky Lasek (then deep in the dog days of skateboarding when most every pro was still driving around in a 1992 Honda Civic) to shoot him and a few other skaters, one being 16-year-old Brandon Novak, at some local spots. I’d seen Brandon’s name around before—he was on the Powell-Peralta sponsored am team rider list when I worked there in the early ’90s—and he did indeed log some quality footage that night…although not exactly in the manner most skaters would prefer. Brandon took a brilliant slam at the base of some random Baltimore statuary formation, a real chin-knocker that wound up nicely punctuating the last few beats to “Pounding Metal,” the kick-ass Exciter track we’d used for a skate montage in the first Big Brother video, shit.

That was the last I’d seen of Brandon up until we started filming for jackass number two in 2006, at which point it was a little hard to reconcile the pile before me with the kid I’d once seen 11 years earlier (Bam was equally surprised when I mentioned to him that Brandon had been in shit). I can’t help but wonder if that slam was the fulcrum of Novak’s “career” in skateboarding, but I guess I really wouldn’t have to wonder if I’d gone so far as to actually read this memoir that reportedly spells out all the dirty and desperate details of his descent into the world of heroin addiction**. Instead I just quickly looked at the photos and had a good laugh over co-author Joe Frantz’s full-page muscle pose, mostly because it reminded me of this goofy-ass photo I’d taken back in 2004.

* By coincidence, we first met Bam and Phil on this very same East Coast tour in 1995, and featured a full-page photo of him ollieing over an underground stairway gap just across the street from Love Park in Philadelphia, PA.

** No offense to Brandon or Joe here, it’s just that I’ve got 20 some other books on my nightstand that I’ve been meaning to read, including Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, none of which I have any time to read, especially Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.