2. The Rebellious Skater #2
“A skateboard?” Gus replied, glancing back at Max.
“No shit. They’re all around you,” Max scoffed, smirking.
Gus smiled through a wince from the casual swearing as Max chuckled.
“Anything cheaper?” he asked, pointing to the red deck.
“No. We only carry the best. We got maple completes for a hundred a pop, Santa Cruz customs for two…”
“Um…” Gus looked down in thought.
Max sighed in annoyance. “If you want cheap, make one yourself.”
Gus’s head snapped up. “How?”
“I don’t know, man,” Max said, getting bored. “Glue some wood together or something.”
Gus’s eyes brightened with an idea, but before he had time to think deeper, the door clattered open and the bell jingled.
An older bald man with a beer belly stormed inside, his attitude menacing.
Gus watched Max lock eyes with the surly guy.
His dull smile dropped to a glare and he straightened his spine as the man approached him.
“What are you doing here?” Max asked.
“Where’s your mom?” the man returned bluntly.
“She’ll be at the house soon.”
The man ignored Max and brushed past the front counter to head to the back room.
“Peaches! Baby! You back there?” the man called out.
Max glared back at Gus. “You gonna buy somethin’ or what?”
“Sorry… no.” Gus slowly backed away and walked out of the store’s glass doors with another bell jingle.
Max groaned with irritation in the ensuing silence.
He locked the register, grabbed his own beat-up everyday board, and flipped their door sign to Closed. Max shook his head as he exited the shop. He tossed the board under his feet and skated down the sidewalk to join his awaiting crew at the skatepark.
~
Gus powered up his old computer at home again, but this time he ensured the volume was fully turned off.
Into the computer, he typed: “How to build a skateboard?” As the light blue screen reflected against his face, Gus scrolled through steps that explained gluing wood scraps together, then molding, drying, cutting, sanding, polishing, and painting a skateboard deck.
He stopped on an image showing trucks, wheels, and grip tape.
Gus huffed quietly. How much would all that cost?
Gus returned to Damage Boardshop the next day. Max was nowhere to be found. He approached the front counter hesitantly as Max’s mom, Peaches, snapped a bubble with her gum and collected herself.
“Hi,” Gus greeted. “Do you have just… trucks and wheels?”
“Yes. My husband was the skateboard expert,” the woman said, cocking her head, “but I do still know what wheels are. They’re right there.”
She pointed down at the glass counter display between them. The clear container inside it held various tools and shiny colored wheels. The many vibrant options overwhelmed Gus, but he was even more discouraged by the high prices. He sighed.
“What could I get with this?” Gus asked slowly. He set a few bills and some change on the counter—about twenty dollars’ worth.
“Nothing out here,” Peaches replied, then tapped her chin. “Hang on a sec.”
The woman stood up and reached around a nearby wall to pull out an old cardboard box labeled The Carnage Bin. The box was full of outdated, overly used trucks and wheels that looked like they should have been thrown out years ago.
“My son doesn’t want us to sell old parts, but I’ll take what we can get…” The woman sighed lightly. “Might be some gems in here that aren’t too banged up.”
Gus fished through the dingy box until he found a set of rusty silver trucks. Maybe with a bit of steel wool and polish, they’d look okay. He then plucked out a matching set of scratched, faded green wheels. Gus beamed.
“I’ll take these,” he said. Remembering the webpage’s list, he also grabbed a roll of grip tape off a nearby rack. “This too.”
The woman rang up Gus’s purchases and placed them in a reused white plastic bag from the grocery shop down the street. As Gus left her store, she watched him doubtfully and snapped her bubble gum again.
Back at the cabin that night, Gus snuck into his father’s woodshop with his newly purchased items. He peeked around to ensure his dad wasn’t inside.
He opened a back closet where he had already stashed a small stolen pile of his father’s wood scraps that he’d rescued from the burn bin that morning.
Placing his bag of parts behind the scraps, he shut the closet door quietly.
As the next few work days followed, Gus paid extra close attention to how his father used an electric handsaw and motorized sander, to his careful way of brushing on wood polish.
Gus always offered to burn their accumulating wood scraps, and whenever Dan was out of sight, he stashed a selection of them in the closet.
Soon he had collected the best lumber scraps, leftover sanding strips, a half-empty glue bottle, a mostly full polish jar, fraying brushes, and extraneous paint—everything Gus could finagle together to give himself the best shot at building his own skateboard.
Two weeks after his first visit to the park, late after midnight, Gus tiptoed down from his bedroom to the living room.
Like many other evenings, his father had fallen asleep on the couch watching The Red Green Show.
Dan was snoring so loudly, Gus knew not even the noisy woodshop machines would wake him.
He had the rest of the night to himself.
He snuck behind his father through the living room and quietly put on his shoes.
Gus glanced back at his sleeping father, then swiped the woodshop keys from their hook and exited the cabin.
Gus dropped all his secret supplies on their main worktable and pulled the string of an overhead lamp. On butcher paper, he drew a blueprint for his board. He messed up a few times, redoing the outline until it felt perfect.
Gus grabbed a thick, long block of pine from his scrap bucket, lined it up on the bandsaw table, and began to cut out a mold.
He cursed after sawing too far into the lumber.
He stopped and listened, hoping his father hadn’t heard him or the machine.
He grabbed a new wood piece and started again, this time getting it right.
Once he’d put together and sanded his mold, Gus ran several pieces of pine through the bandsaw until he had a pile of flat sheets.
He brushed wood glue on each and grouped them together.
Gus then laid the sheets on the mold and used clamps to tighten down the layers.
He hid the entire thing back in his closet to dry, covering it with a dirty tarp so his father would not find it. Gus shut the closet door.
The next morning, Dan peacefully whistled as he flipped over a bubbling blueberry pancake in a skillet. Gus poured maple syrup all over his own stack and scarfed down his first bites of breakfast, seemingly in a rush to start woodworking. As he tasted the pancakes, Gus sighed with delight.
“How is everything you cook so delicious?” Gus asked his father.
“Well,” Dan chuckled, “it’s nice to finally have someone to cook for again.” He sat down with his own plate, a rare smile full of old memories growing on his face. He looked at Gus glowing with hungry energy and started to reminisce.
“You know, back when your mom and I first moved out here, we always—”
“Meet you in the shop!” Gus shot up from the table and placed his syrupy dish in the sink.
Dan’s eyes widened as he watched his son leave the room to put his boots on.
He had never seen Gus this eager to start work.
When the door shut and Gus ran off to the woodshop, Dan was left in complete silence.
This somehow felt familiar. All alone in the kitchen again, Dan sighed, falling deep into thought.
He pulled out his wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open to the faded image he always kept in the folded leather, the small one of him with Gus’s mother, Megan.
The photo showed them in their mid-twenties, long before the divorce.
They both stood outside this same cabin with beaming faces, joyful new homeowners.
They were newlyweds—young, happy, in love.
A year later, Gus was born. Dan turned away from the photo and frowned.
He felt lost. So many haunting memories were creeping back these days.
He grunted as he shoved his wallet back into his jeans, then took another bite of his sweet pancakes and bacon.
Dan was in no rush. He shook his head, trying not to think of the days when he always cooked for three.
Dan and Gus quickly moved through the workday, passing tools and handing off tasks, now an efficient team.
Even though he was accomplishing all that his father asked of him, Gus had his mind elsewhere.
He couldn’t stop himself from counting down the hours until he could check back on his skateboard and finish it.
Well into the dark of that night, his father was again sound asleep and Gus took out the now-dry wood from the closet.
He knew cutting such a precise shape would be extremely challenging, and it would probably come out looking far unlike what he saw back at the board shop, but he had to try.
Gus drew the nose and tail of a skateboard deck on the dry glued wood.
Using the skills he learned from his dad, he started cutting out the shape with the bandsaw.
He drifted off his saw line, cursed, and course-corrected.
After, Gus sanded down the crooked edge and blew off the shavings. It looked smooth and even. He smiled.
Finally, he polished the board to show the fine grain and soon had a clean, thin skateboard deck.
Not far from the shop, Gus placed the fresh skateboard on the old railroad ties and stepped on it to test its durability. He tilted his head down to inspect the wood. Everything looked right. He nodded. Gus then jumped up and down for some added weight. The board snapped immediately.
“Fuck.”
His head fell back in frustrated defeat.