Barrelhouse Reviews: Chipped by José Vadi
Reviewed by Anu Khosla
Soft Skull Press / April 2024 / 183 pp
Wakeboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking—these sports, action sports, are often defined by their extremity; but another way of categorizing them is by their relationship to dynamic, natural environments. Skateboarding, by contrast, exists in a different context every time it is practiced, and most commonly exists in public spaces, urban or suburban. The arena can change from day to day, from moment to moment. Concrete may be highly static, but elements like cars and pedestrians keep the sport in a constant state of flux. Plus, the public image of the skater is frequently of slacker, stoner, or publicly visible delinquent. More Americans have likely seen a “NO SKATEBOARDING” sign than have seen someone do a heelflip.
José Vadi’s second book, Chipped, is a series of essays that together show what it is to grow up seeing the world through a skateboarder’s eyes, what it is to age into a skater’s creaky body, and what it is to occupy a space not intended for you. Chipped is a book about public space: who gets to use it, how they are permitted to use it, and the ways that the abstract public mind reads varying engagements with it.
These politics of public space are even more complex for people of color. As a Puerto Rican-Mexican American, Vadi can speak to this complexity in a way other skaters might not:
When a Brown kid starts skateboarding in any era, they are entering a policed world that presumes their guilt, accelerated now by the four wheels propelling them, sometimes illegally, down city streets, schoolyards, back alleys. We enter society always as the Other and dismantle the systemic racism behind the idea of a skateboarder with every push, every pair of Dickies against dark skin above white wheels and neon wood, every pack of BIPOC kids bombing the streets from spot to spot. Skateboarding is rebellion incarnate, but mobbing spots with a pack of kids that look like you feels closer to the physical reclamation of so-called public space.
From his childhood in Pomona, to his college years skating around Berkeley and San Francisco, and now into his time as an adult resident of Sacramento, Vadi keeps reclaiming space for his body and his board. The claim Vadi makes on these spaces is not colonial. It is not that Vadi and his pack of skaters own these spaces, certainly not any more than I own the playground down the street. It is that his skateboard provides him with a different stance from which to see and to love a space. A handrail or a curb are not just utilitarian elements of landscape design for a skater; they are an opportunity for communion, for artmaking. Vadi understands the public canvas to be shared.
Though it may be new to some readers, the idea that sports and toys (as Vadi refers to his own skateboards) can have a political relationship to space is not new. Vadi writes about Ledger Smith, “The Roller Man,” who skated across the country in 1963 to raise awareness for the March on Washington, facing animosity throughout the way. Smith’s story serves as “a reminder of how the liberation of recreational space was integral to the civil rights movement.”
This type of streetwise liberation exists today, of course. It particularly flared up in the year 2020, from the street protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder to San Francisco’s closing John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park to allow for running, biking, skating, and walking. Vadi observed these same reclamations in his local BART parking lot during the height of COVID lockdowns: “Nobody and everybody was supposed to be here. The subway parking lot had become a neighborhood United Nations used for all outdoor activity.” Suddenly, even non-skaters were acting like delinquents in their cravings for shared space.
Not just an ode to skateboarding, Chipped is also a love letter to my home city. Vadi evokes warm San Francisco nights and city lights as he tells tales of kick pushing his way through The Wiggle or riding with a pack of other skaters down the Embarcadero. It was San Francisco’s status as an iconic skateboarding city and the Bay Area’s possibilities for carless living—so foreign to a Southern Californian like Vadi—that brought him north in the first place. It was here, in the Bay, that Vadi’s love for skateboarding continued to grow, as did his love for the written word. Vadi tells of his days at UC Berkeley, falling in love with writing as a member of the local slam poetry organization Youth Speaks: “Showing up to my first slams at the Starry Plough felt like pulling up to a popular skate spot and recognizing all the pros lurking at their local ledges.” I wondered if I had seen him perform when I was a high schooler attending Youth Speaks Slams; probably yes, given our slight age difference. Like skateboarding, spoken word was an art form he could see himself in:
If skateboarding challenged the emphasis on organized team sports and coaches, so too did spoken word feel like an alternative, a challenge to the acceptable ideals of poetry. Paraphrasing Tony Hawk, the Olympics needs skateboarding more than skateboarding needs the Olympics, and likewise it’s been spoken word poets who, through the power of their work on the page and beyond, have pushed poetry and letters to new heights in recent years.
With rail slides and with greater existential issues, skateboarders are always seeking a balance. On the one hand, they’re seeking acceptance within the public sphere. They would like, for example, not to be illegal. As Vadi puts it, “No matter the age, being a skateboarder lends itself to caustic stares from passersby.” On the other hand, skaters are generally rebellious and much of their culture is defined by defiance of norms. They want enough acceptance to exist, but not so much as to commodify their own culture. Please let them be, but let them be punk.
I hadn’t finished reading Chipped during 4th of July weekend this year. I hadn’t finished reading, for example, about the 1996 beating of skater Satva Leung by SFPD officers (the run-in was captured on camera for skate company Toy Machine’s skate film Welcome to Hell, set to the song “Somebody to Love.”) But Saturday, July 6, the last hurrah for this summer’s Independence Day Celebrations, was the occasion of the annual Dolores Park Hill Bomb. Hill bombing is a time-honored tradition amongst San Francisco skaters—riding a board down a scarily steep hill, of which our city has many. Last year, the Dolores Park Hill Bomb had especially high attendance numbers, and devolved once again into bad blood between the community and the police. By the end of the day the SFPD had arrested 113 young skaters, holding them for hours without access to food, water, or bathrooms. A class action lawsuit against the department, brought by the teenagers and their parents, is ongoing.
This year, the SFPD tried to shut down the event before it even happened. The skate community pointed out that the department could have used city resources to help make the event safer and more controlled, but instead, the SFPD erected barriers around all of Dolores Park to prevent it from happening. According to San Francisco Chief of Police William Scott, “unfettered access to that hill is part of the problem.” I found, that day, that officers wouldn’t even let me drive by the park on my way to the grocery store for some fresh basil. That’s public safety, they say. In the end, the event happened on Church Street, a much steeper, more dangerous hill than Dolores.
San Francisco, like cities of all shapes, sizes, and political leanings, currently faces real challenges, including a struggle over public spaces. Who deserves to be in our public spaces? How do we define the public? What activities should be allowed in public spaces? Who counts as the local community? The answers are typically implied by authorities, rather than stated explicitly, because to give those answers out loud would mean revealing their cruelty. But Vadi shows us that sometimes—as in the case of the BART parking lot—it is the skaters who teach non-skaters how to share a space. Perhaps considering our public spaces through a skateboarder’s lens might help us see more clearly.
After a recent injury, Vadi thinks back on Thrasher Magazine’s iconic editor-in-chief, Jake Phelps: “What did Phelps say? Something about skateboarding owing you nothing but wheel bite in the rain?” Skateboarding owes you nothing, Chipped tells us, but if you are wise, you sure can take something from it.
Anu Khosla is an emerging writer based in San Francisco. You can find her words in BOMB, The Millions, Write or Die, and The Racket.