It all started when my friend Andrew asked if I would pretend to be in a band for a music video. All I had to do was wear a tuxedo and pretend to play my synthesizer, but the morning of the shoot on August 31, 2017 I went out to my van to leave and noticed the battery was completely dead. I checked under the hood and noticed that the battery wires were cut and someone had unsuccessfully attempted to steal it but didn’t have a wrench to unbolt it. I didn’t notice any forced entry under the hood so they must have used a “slim jim” to get into the vehicle and open it up. Just thinking it was an inconvenience and an unfortunate biproduct of living near a university and having cheap rent I called Andrew for a ride to the video shoot. Like any good friend later on he helped me replace the battery cables. It didn’t even occur to me that anything else was stolen from the vehicle for a few more days.
Later that week I was in Grand Island for the Nebraska State Fair and had just parked my van when suddenly it hit me! I didn’t have anything really of value in the vehicle except for a skateboard that I had always kept with me “just in case”. I immediately checked the back of the van and sure enough it was missing! But this wasn’t just any skateboard, I’ve had many skateboards over the years and eventually they were shredded to toothpicks, all except for this one skateboard. This is the board that survived my teenage years and was “retired” from shredding to be the casual mode of transportation kept in my vehicle through my 20s. It was the board I would ride from my apartment near Venice Beach to the Venice Fishing Pier every day to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. But most importantly this was the skateboard that held memories of a friendship that only exist in my mind.
In high school I worked at Burger King with one of my friends, Joe Boye. He and his younger brother Noah were two of the most fearless skaters I knew. Joe was a total weirdo. A true original. When we weren’t terrorizing customers on the drive thru we were likely being chased off of some school or mall property by a custodian or security guard. As we grew up and went on with our lives Noah joined the Marines, Joe joined the Army and we lost contact for a while.
Joe left the Army and we reconnected but Noah stayed in the Marines until he was killed in Falujah. I attended the funeral with Joe and again life went on until eventually I moved from Nebraska to Los Angeles by accident. During this time we only kept in touch occasionally, that was until I received word from a friend in 2009 that Joe had passed from suicide. I wasn’t able to fly back for the funeral so it has always felt like Joe is still out there somewhere. The memories I have of the Boye brothers have lived with me in that skateboard I’ve carried with me ever since. Etched into the top of that board are the lyrics to Pantera’s “Floods”. I scratched them in to the grip tape with a pink paint-marker in Joe’s bedroom sometime in high school while listening to metal. Every time I see it I get taken back to hanging out in their house reading Thrasher and making up ridiculous songs like “punkass” and “goregasm”. This this crazy, fearless guy with a shaved head and boundless energy.
So when I realized the board was gone I went numb. Sure I was angry but mostly I was sad that something was taken that held so much symbolic power. I stewed on it for a few days before I decided what I wanted to do about it. At that time I was working for a local venue called Vega doing social media and design. Because I was already making 3-5 flyers a week for upcoming shows I decided to also make a flyer expressing my feelings to whoever took that artifact away from me. I wanted to tell them what they took and what it represented.
It ended up being the most passive-aggressive but honest thing I’ve probably written. I hung up maybe 4 of them at coffee shops around town and a couple of them near my house where I thought they might see it if they lived nearby. Then I just kinda forgot about it. I did what I could, it was cathartic. I figured I’d never see it ever again but I had to get my frustrations out somehow.
A couple days later I went to a movie. My best friend sent me a text from the East Coast telling me that there was a post about my skateboard blowing up on Reddit. Someone at one of the coffee houses took a photo of it and posted it with the title, “I don’t think this skateboard’s thief knew quite what he was taking.” By the time I got out of the movie it hit the front page and I spent most of the night watching it blow up and answering messages. There was also a fair amount of salty trolling and cyber venom but the ratio was mostly positive affirmations from people sharing stories about things that were also taken from them.
I was contacted by the Lincoln newspaper the next day as well as a TV station in Omaha that were both doing stories on it. People online were offering to send me a new board and eventually I got a message via Reddit from Tony Hawk. I probably don’t need to tell you that he is the Michael Jordan of skateboarding but I do have to tell you that he was one of my very first heroes. The first “real” skateboard I got was his Powell Peralta street deck for my 10th birthday. I was obsessed with the Bones Brigade! I had a dubbed copy of “The Search For Animal Chin” that I probably played every day for a solid year. We sent a few messages back and forth and he offered to send me a new complete skateboard. But as fate would have it I didn’t even need it.
The next morning the newspaper sent a photographer to take a photo of me near “the scene of the crime” and by total coincidence this was also when the TV crew was supposed to show up. I went to the backyard where my van was parked and underneath the vehicle I saw it! The skateboard was back! I had successfully guilted it’s thief to return it sometime the previous night between 1am and that next morning. I was even more shocked than I was happy about it, but I was definitely stoked. It made the news, even in Australia. It was at the bottom of the front page of the Lincoln Journal-Star the next day just under an article about Betsy DeVos eating babies or something.
As soon as I discovered that it was back I posted a photo on Reddit, “UPDATE on stolen skateboard… IT CAME BACK!!!!! which also went to the front page. Tony Hawk left a message on my Facebook letting me know he would be sending a skateboard anyway, and he did!
The skateboard with all of the memories no longer leaves the house. I still skate it to the mailbox when it’s nice but the deck now has two dates on it: “Noah 4-13-04” and “Joe 2-7-09”. I still keep a skateboard in my car out of habit but the deck Tony Hawk sent me lives on the wall. It says, “Keep ripping T.J.! – Tony Hawk”
Article at Lincoln Journal Star by Peter Salter
