Color 8.3 Editor's Letter Buy This Issue Now

I’ve always wondered if the average person who sees a group of skaters pushing down the street assumes they are a gang. Maybe that’s what people once thought, before skateboarding had infiltrated all levels of culture—into body spray advertisements and onto breakfast cereal boxes. Years ago, back in my old hometown, people of all types would yell at skaters out of their cars, sometimes even stop and try to fight us, as if the only reason anyone would be out in the street was that they were looking to rumble. Now, I suppose people assume skaters are a team of young athletes who’ve just finished an X-Games training session, off to chug Gatorades and polish their trophies. I can’t tell you which of these scenarios is worse—actually, that’s not true, fighting always sucks, even if it means dealing with people asking me if I’ve ever competed on the Mega Ramp.

As a kid I was fascinated by pirates, who, I’ve since learned, raped quite regularly. Which is obviously horrible and something I just can’t endorse, yet I still see the Jolly Roger and get stoked. In 1965, the writer Hunter S. Thompson spent months with Sonny Barger and his infamous Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, which he’d just founded in Oakland, California. Hunter later published an account of these wild days in his book Hell’s Angels. In it, he describes his own fascination and eventual disenchantment with the gang, who he’d idealized for their freewheeling lifestyle, urban outlawism, copious partying, and unrepentant drug experimentation, but who increasingly began to frighten and intimidate him, finally vowing to kill him in the end. It’s quite a book, and speaks profoundly about the attraction of outlaws, and how idealism is shattered when our heroes turn out less like Robin Hood, and more like Charles Manson. It also throws new light on all those skateboarders who’ve been playing outlaw dress-up and riding across America lately. All I can say is that they’d better be doing lots of raping, or shoving