Thursday, October 6, 2011

Thrashin'

Whenever somebody ever asks me to tell them a story or event, this is always the first thing I think. It is hands down my favourite anecdote and think some parts of it are pretty funny. Definitely never going to forget it and not just because of the scars I still have from it.

So here it goes:

Like I mentioned in my story about my high school band, The Pragmatics, my friends and I used to party in Warden Woods ravine ALL THE TIME in high school. Nobody's house would ever be open and this was kind of the most convenient places considering where everyone lived. So at this party (Now that I think about it, it was the first one I ever went to.) my friend Paul and I were (obviously) pretty drunk and talking about going skating. He mentioned that the other day he had been out with his girlfriend and found a giant hill that he rode down a few times on his bike. We both concluded that we should go skate the hill with our friend Damien as soon as possible. I even said (hilariously now, in hindsight) "I hope I bail".

So a few days later we met up to go find a place to skate and then try to find the hill. It took us a little bit of searching through residential side streets, but eventually we found what we were looking for. I jokingly pushed hard and hauled as right into (the entrance was curved) but pulled up as soon as I saw it.

This thing is fucking massive. I haven't been to it in a few years, but I would estimate that the incline/whatever/you know what the fuck I'm talking about is roughly 400m long. The top quarter is very steep and it gets progressively less steep as you go. The bottom curves left, easing into a very long and straight residential street. Minus the possibility of a car hauling ass up the hill to hit you, the hill is pretty much the ideal for hitting and just bombing.

Sidenote: This is seriously my favourite part of skating. It could be because I am about as far as you can get from being a technically gifted skater, but hitting a hill and just going really fast on my skateboard is one of my favourite things on earth.

Our strategy was to start at a relatively low part of the hill and work our way up on each successive run. This worked great. Even going from 2/3 of the way down the hill, you still went REALLY FAST. This was happening around the end of June. Being high school students, we were done for the year but elementary schools were still in session, which meant our neighborhood was still pretty empty. Also, it being the end of June meant that it was really hot out, so we opted to take our shirts off because we were sweating so much.

SO, I took off my shirt and tucked it into the back of my checkerboard shorts, with most of it hanging out. This is definitely up there as one of the dumbest things I've done in my life. Paul and Damien went first (We would stagger ourselves so we wouldn't be all be beside each while going down, because that is super fucking dangerous.) with me going last.

Also adding this in here because I don't really know where else to put it, but sometime during the course of this we named the hill "The Poo Hill".

By this point we had gotten about 2/3-3/4 of the way up the hill. This meant that we really getting up there in speed. I'd guess about 20kph? This could be skewed for obvious reason though. So pretty early in this run I thought I felt my shirt fall out of my shorts and for some completely asinine reason turned my head back to check if it had. As soon as I did I realized how bad of a decision that was.

My board went into what skaters call "death-wobbles", which is when your board starts to rapidly wobble back and forth while you're going very fast. When this happen it's borderline impossible to keep control and usually means a bail is imminent. This is all something I realized right away. I knew it was only a matter of time before I was going to fall off. I guess this is the closest thing I've had to a near-death experience. It might sound ridiculous to some saying that about falling off a skateboard, but seriously what If I landed headfirst? Landed awkwardly and broken my neck? Bad shit could have happened and I was pretty lucky. But anyways, I remember thinking when the wobbles started to get really bad that I was going to die. It wasn't even that I was scared, it was like I knew it was going to happen and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I remember thinking "Fuck, well I guess this is it then."I jumped off my board to see if I could maybe just run it out, but knew I was going way too fucking fast for that.

SO, I fell into the cement gutter on the right side of the road on my left side and slid for about ten meters. My left arm and leg scraping along rough pavement is what stopped me. Think about that. So I was lying in the gutter just thinking "Fuck!" mostly because I was supposed to go to Wonderland the next day with a girl I liked (I think if there was anything in my life that proved how fucking emo I am it is this (and there are a fuckton of examples), but I just absolutely massacred my body and the first thing I thought of was that I wouldn't be able to make my date the next day. LADIES????). A little after the bail, my skateboard came roaring down the hill and hit my head. That was what kind of got me to stand up.

I got up and took a look at my self and cleaned my self up (re: Brushed a minimal amount of dirt off of my cuts.). To give you an idea what happened to me I made an incredibly in-depth diagram in MS paint. The orange represents "road rash", pretty shallow cuts from skin getting scraped off by, you guessed it, the road. The red represents deeper cuts that bled a whole ton.





















Obviously my first idea was go and find Paul and Damien. I figured they would come back to see what happened to me, since I obviously didn't finish the run. Since I am constantly trying to be funny (operative word: "trying"), I turned so they would only see the right side of my body (This near-death experience really shows what I'm all about: love and trying to be funny). They pulled up looking a little relieved that I had apparently only scratched my right elbow and then I laughed pretty hard at their horrified expressions as I turned around and they saw the real carnage that was the left side of my body.

The thing about this is that I was extremely high on adrenaline for about half an hour after the fall happened. Rather than limping around, I was jumping around really stoked that I had just taken the gnarliest bail I had ever seen in real life. After documenting all of injuries on Damien's state-of-the-art Motorolla Razr (If these pictures still existed somewhere, I would obviously post them because believe me, they are great. But they're gone forever.), we began to make our way uphill figuring that we should get me home and start to take care of my absurd amount of injuries.

Like I mentioned earlier, elementary and middle schools were still in session at this time. So when we passed by Bliss Carmen Public School on the way home it happened to be their time to go home and the area was swarmed with little kids. You could actually hear the crowd of kids go silent as we walked by. The girls all yelled "Gross!" and the boys all yelled "Cool!".

We got home and started looking for first-aid stuff right away but came up short, getting only a few band-aids and some "steri-strips". Around this time my adrenaline was starting to wear off and I was feeling it pretty hard. For some reason (re: Us being young and stupid.) we thought it would be a good idea for me to get in the shower to clean the dirt off of my cuts. So I dragged myself into the bathroom and got in. That was probably the most pain I've felt in my life. I passed out from the pain almost immediately, but only for a second. I managed to get myself out and then laid down on bathroom floor for like ten minutes. I eventually got back to my room and laid down on my bed while we tried to figure what exactly we were going to do with me.

During this time the phone rang and I got Damien to pick it up. Now, all this happened just after I had applied for my first job to the City of Toronto as a lifeguard. I hadn't heard back in awhile and assumed that the job was a no-go and I would be unemployed for the summer. Instead, this was the time they chose to call back with an offer, while I was semi-conscious and covered in blood laying on my bed. I did end up getting that job though. I used the money I made that summer to buy my Hoppus bass.

After this we decided that I could go over to Damien's where his sister, who at the the time was in school for nursing, would patch me up. We figured I wasn't bad enough for the emergency room, so it would be better to save waiting extensively at the hospital for another time. It took what seemed like an hour or so to get all my cuts completely cleaned and dressed and looking back now, it was actually a really good time hanging out in Damien's kitchen. Recess was on.

It took a pretty long time for some of the deeper scars to heal and I had a staph infection in my foot, but I got back to normal with tons of time left in the summer. Still do have some of the scars from it.

Coincidence was that about a month or so after I fell on the hill Damien and Paul went back to it and Paul fell and got pretty messed up on it. Though his was a lot more serious, as he got a minor concussion. His was more of the "Holy shit! Man you could've gotten really hurt!" as opposed to "Fuck yeah! Cuts and blood!"

So yea. That's my poo hill/skate bail story.

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