Done with the book. Now there are just more questions. As my friend Elizabeth has noted, though, since it takes place more or less in the present and concerns a lot of well-known people, one can keep discovering more details to partly mask the pain of having finished reading. And, of course, the life continues, and we can read Wilsey’s funny, sassy, wry notes in McSweeney’s on his ongoing and occasionally surreal book tour, or google something else and happen on his skating rhapsody/memorial from September 2003. It shares a few observations with a long passage in Oh the Glory of It All, then takes off into an analysis of Tony Hawk, Thrasher magazine, and skater ethics (follow the link for the whole piece):
The steepest hills in San Francisco—where I grew up and learned to skateboard—lead up to and around Russian Hill, which isn’t a hill but a series of hills. The steepest of these crests is in the middle of Filbert Street, between Hyde and Leavenworth.
The road seems seems to disappear mid-block, like an incomplete section of elevated freeway. It looks as if the street is dangling 300 meters in the air. When you drive a car up to the lip, it drops too steeply to see over the hood. The drop is demarcated by two yellow-and-black signs that say: “Steep grade ahead, buses and large trucks not advisable; sharp crest, 10 miles per hour.”
My best friend, a boy named Blane Morf who is now dead, got a skateboard while I was away at boarding school. When I came home for summer holidays—on probation for a D-minus average, largely attributable to the fact that I was harassed mercilessly for being from San Francisco (making me a “fag”)—I discovered that he was a skater. Blane didn’t know any other skaters, since there weren’t many others. And, even if there had been, the kind of person who is drawn to skateboarding is the kind of person who is not given to sociability.
Skateboarders are lonely. Skateboarders are not well loved. I was lonely and not well loved. I tried his board. He taught me a few things. It was no fun watching while the other skated. He begged me to get my own. I got some money out of my mother (guilty about boarding school), went down to the skate shop, and bought myself a skateboard. Then I climbed to the top of Russian Hill.
I set down my board, stepped on, pushed off. My plan was to roll the whole slope and use the flat to slow down gradually before the intersection. I had no back-up plan. The acceleration was instant. In a matter of seconds, I was moving faster than my legs had ever taken me. After 10 meters, I was moving faster than I’d moved outside of a car. Faster.
Wilsey ends the book saying that he can’t wait to write about something besides himself. (As Delmore Schwartz once said, “Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me.”) That’s good. Then I hope he writes some more about himself. The book, nearly 500 pages as it is, isn’t long enough for the things he still has to say. If Wilsey were writing this he’d acknowledge the corniness of the metaphor as soon as he typed it, but it’s also true: If you can haul yourself up to this kind of crest, only then do you get to fly down, shrieking with gladness at being so free to plummet and crash, to beat the record, to steer, wobble, and sing.
Get thrashed [London Review of Books, via Fairfax]
Categories: Wilsey, McSweeney’s
