"Teenagers took the ruins of the twentieth century and made art out of it." - Craig Stecyk, The Dogtown Articles.

I stood in line at the book signing like everyone else waiting their turn. I was surprised by the number of people who were there. I didn’t think anyone would care about what we did all those years ago. I could barely remember the last time I saw Robin. It had been decades. We kept in touch for a while after that summer, but our lives went in different directions. We always told ourselves that would never happen, but I think we both knew it would.

When my buddy Manny told me she wrote a book, I couldn’t believe it. It turns out, a lot of people didn’t believe it. Some of the reviews wondered how a privileged woman knew so much about the early history of Dogtown’s skateboarding scene. One of the writers from LA Weekly even suggested that her book was fiction, or that she was taking credit for other people’s stories.

They’re wrong, but I understand the suspicion. Santa Monica was a lot different back then, and people who lived north of the I-10 didn’t have anything to do with what was happening on the south side. They were two different worlds, separated by a freeway.

As my part of the line rounded a corner, I got my first good look at her in forever. Not much had changed. She was older and a little heavier, same as me, but still the Robin I used to know, only with grey hair now. If I ran into her walking down the street, I’d be able to pick her out right away. That wouldn’t happen though, just like back then, we don’t live in the same worlds. Santa Monica became too expensive for me some time in the 90s. The last I heard, she married an entertainment lawyer and they’re over near Malibu now.

I wondered if she’d recognize me, and if I’d say something if she didn’t. Every so often she’d look up, run her eyes down the line, smile, maybe wave to someone, then sign the next book. It took a while, but my turn came.

“Who should I make it out to?” she asked, still looking down.

“Emilio.”

“I like that name,” she said. “If you’ve had a chance to read the book, you’ll know there’s an Emilio right in chapter—” she cut herself off as she lifted her head. “Emilio?”

“Yeah,” I said, choking up a little bit. “It’s me.”

Robin looked stunned. She stood up slowly. “It’s been over forty years.”

“Almost fifty.”

“My God. Almost fifty,” she repeated. “Where did the time go?”

The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest ones on record, and it was made worse because we were in the middle of a drought. It was all they talked about on the news, and I remember my dad being stressed out about it. But honestly? It didn’t affect me too much. We didn’t have a lawn to water, and I spent most of my time at the beach, so the shower restrictions didn’t really mean anything.

It was a different story north of the I-10. The wealthy people there weren’t used to not having what they wanted. When they were told that they had to ration water, a lot of them left for the summer. They had the money to get out and took their families east for a vacation or whatever. And that ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me.

Back then, there were two shortcuts to getting girls. Having a car, or being a surfer. A car was impossible. None of us could afford one. When it came to surfing, maybe you could save up and get a board. The real problem was showing up at Pacific Ocean Park uninvited. If one of the older guys didn’t give you the okay, you’d get your ass kicked. Badly.

So we ended up skateboarding instead. It wasn’t cool like surfing, and it didn’t help with the girls, at least not at first. But skateboarding stuff was sold at surf shops like Zephyr, and that gave us an excuse to be there all the time. Once those older guys got to know your face, they knew you were one of the local kids. That was how you earned an invite into the ocean without taking a beating. They still made you wait for it, though.

Other than the poor kids in south Santa Monica, it felt like nobody in America was still skating. It was a dead fad from the 60s. The upside to that was that you could usually find a skateboard at a rummage sale for next to nothing. I think I paid a dollar for mine. It was perfect for kids who couldn’t afford Little League and all that stuff.

We knew every place to skate between the strip mall parking lot and the promenade down by Venice Beach. Some of them were great spots, but after a couple of years everything became too familiar. We needed something new. That’s where the drought and all the rich people leaving in the summer came in. A lot of the houses on the north side of town had swimming pools. With the water restrictions, they were sitting empty, just waiting for us.

"I found one," Manny said out in front of my dad’s place one day.

"You always find one."

“No, you don’t get it.” He shook his head. "This one's different."

I’d never seen him be so excited about anything before.

"It's huge," he said. "And it’s not one of those rectangle ones. It’s kidney-shaped.”

We were stoked to skate any pool, but if you found a rounded one, you kept that a secret. Neighborhood kids went to war over them, and the last thing we wanted was for some other guys to take it over. What made them so special were the inclines. They were smooth and more gradual. That made skateboarding feel like surfing, which is what we really wanted to be doing.

"A kidney pool, for real?"

"I'm telling you, Emilio."

He took me to it that afternoon. "It’s that second house right there," he said, pointing to a place at the end of a cul-de-sac.

"You’re sure it’s empty?”

"There was a station wagon in the driveway every night last week. It’s been gone for a few days now.”

That’s all I needed to hear. We walked around to the side of the house and climbed the fence. Both the house and the yard were the kind you’d expect to see in magazines, but we didn’t care about either. We ran right to the pool.

“Holy shit.” Manny wasn’t exaggerating. He found the best pool I’d ever seen, and it was totally empty. We didn’t even need to sweep leaves out of it or anything.

“I told you!”

Manny threw his board into the deep end, then slid down after it. He sprinted and jumped on it. The momentum carried him halfway up the far wall. He spun around and let gravity pull him back into the bowl.

“Let’s go!” he shouted, pumping his fist in the air.

I took a running start, skating along the concrete that surrounded the pool, then dropped into the shallow end. The transition was perfect, just like riding a wave out on the ocean. “This is unfucking real!” I yelled as I went whizzing past Manny.

We grinded that pool. The shape and soft lines made everything come so much easier. It was nothing like fighting for angles or figuring out runs in a rectangular pool. We didn’t have to think about anything. Every curve led to another one. We went in endless loops, from one side to the other, in all directions. It was a hell of a time, until it all came to a crashing end.

“What the fuck are you doing in my backyard?”

I heard the voice, but couldn’t see who said it. All I could tell was that it was a girl, and she was as loud as she was angry. Manny looked at me in a panic. “Scram!” He took off, running up the side of the pool and made a beeline to the fence.

I have no idea why I didn’t follow him. That wasn’t the first time we got busted, and I always took off with him. For whatever reason, instead of running, I grabbed the lip of the pool and pulled myself up enough so that I could peek my head over the edge.

That was the first time I saw Robin. She was standing on her patio, wearing a white polo shirt and pale pink skirt like she’d just come back from playing tennis. She was holding a cast-iron frying pan out in front of her, trying to convince me she knew how to cause some damage with it. She was about my age, and really cute. The way most blonde-haired girls who play tennis are.

“Don’t move,” she said.

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“What are you doing in my pool?”

“Skateboarding.”

“In my pool?” She looked as confused as most people would have been at the time.

“Yeah. These kidney pools are perfect for it.”

She still looked confused, but a little less threatened. She lowered the frying pan down to her side.

“What’s your name?”

“Emilio.”

“I’m Robin.”

“Nice to meet you, Robin.”

That’s how it all started. For the next hour, we sat on her patio talking. I told her all about surfing and skateboarding, and it was like I was speaking a different language. She had no idea what I was talking about, other than mentioning that her dad liked the Beach Boys. When I told her we mostly listened to Black Sabbath, she had no clue who they were.

“We’ll go see them,” she said. “Next time they’re in town. My treat.”

“For real?”

“Yeah, for real. You’ll have to give me your phone number before you go.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed her, but I was so excited by the idea of seeing Black Sabbath that it flew right over my head that a girl just asked for my number. Then my mind went right back to thinking about skateboarding.

“So your parents, they’re like, gone?” I asked.

“For a bit,” she said. “They drove my brother out to Philadelphia for college.”

I liked the sound of that. “So you think my friends and I could come back tomorrow? Maybe like five or six of us?” I was already trying to figure out who I’d ask to come along, but when she didn’t say anything, it felt like she was going to say no.

“I could teach you how to skate.”

“You'd do that?"

“Yeah. I’ll bring you my brother’s board. He doesn’t use it anymore.”

She gave me half a smile and looked over to the house like she was really considering it. I got it. I was basically a stranger asking if I could bring a bunch of poor kids to what we’d call a mansion. I had no idea she was thinking about something else.

“You wanna come inside?” she asked almost sheepishly, biting her lip as she waited for my answer.

“Yeah, sure.” I thought she was just being polite. It was hot out; maybe they had air conditioning or something. You can’t blame me for being oblivious. Most people like Robin didn’t even speak to Mexicans. Not unless we worked for them. The idea that she’d be interested in me never entered my head. I was just hoping to find out if rich kids had something better than Tang to drink.

The patio doors opened into a kitchen that was almost bigger than my whole apartment. It was hard to believe people actually lived like this. From there we walked down a hallway to the front of the house. We stopped near the living room. I figured that was where she was leading me. Then she backed up a couple of steps onto the staircase.

"C'mon," she said. "My room's up here."

That’s when it finally hit me that I was about to fuck around with a white girl.

Her bedroom was exactly what you think a seventeen-year-old girl's room would look like. A lot of pink things and piles of clothes all over the place. Her walls were covered in posters, stuff I hated like Leif Garrett and the Bee Gees. That sort of thing. I tried not to hold it against her, but if we were going to be friends, she'd have to start listening to The Who.

"Let me get this mess," she said, pushing a pair of jeans and a sweater off her bed onto the floor.

I was about to tell her that it wasn’t a mess compared to my room, but when Robin turned around she pulled her polo shirt off, and I went silent.

“First time seeing tits?”

“No.” I shook my head, but couldn’t stop staring at them. I wasn’t lying. I’d been with other girls before, just never while sober, or with anyone as beautiful as she was. “You’re just—”

“Take yours off too,” she said. “I bet skating gave you abs.”

I got my shirt off faster than ever before. The look in her eyes alone was making me hard.

“Yeah, it did,” she said, running a finger up my stomach. “This is going to be fun.”

Robin wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me in for a kiss. My hands slid along her waist and up her sides, but I stopped there. I wasn’t sure how far I was allowed to go with a white girl.

“Here,” she said, lifting my hands to her breasts as if she knew what I was thinking. Hers found the buttons on my 501s and popped them open. We kissed the whole time. She was better at it than I was. Less nervous, anyway.

When she pulled my pants down, I was almost embarrassed by how quickly my cock sprang out at her. She smirked, but I think she took it as a compliment. She stroked me a few times. It felt so good that I tensed up and almost had to pull away. Luckily, she turned her back to me and pointed down at the clasp holding up her skirt.

“Undo it.”

I hoped she couldn’t feel my fingers shaking or notice how long it was taking me. “It’s a little tricky.” It came free and dropped to the floor as soon as I said that.

She faced me again, and I moved in close. My cock was hard against her as we kissed. Robin kept moving toward the bed until the back of her legs hit the mattress. She fell onto it, and I went down with her.

“Take them off,” she said, snapping the band of her panties.

I got on my knees between her thighs and started pulling them down. Robin raised her legs straight into the air so I could get them all the way off. That was the first time I’d ever seen blonde pubic hair before.

“I’m on the pill,” she said. “You know what that is?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Then fuck me like you don’t have to worry about knocking me up.”

The thing that stuck with me the most after she said that was the way she lay there completely naked with her legs spread, staring up at me like she couldn’t believe that I hadn’t already pounced on her. I needed a minute.

Maybe to her I was just another guy, but to me, she was someone I’d been taught was unattainable. The kind of girl I didn’t even let myself think about. Nothing in my life prepared me for climbing into bed with a white girl from the north side of town. I still couldn’t believe that I was in her house, never mind about to have sex with her.

Of course, all of that race and class stuff disappeared when the fucking started. It was just me and Robin. I’m not going to say the first few minutes weren’t awkward. They were. But once I got out of my own head, I made up for it.

I fucked her hard. We ended up all over her bedroom, on the bed, on the floor, even up against the wall. Nothing was off limits. At one point, I even had her half out the window.

“Holy fuck, Emilio, your cock is so good.” She was bracing herself against the window frame as I was ramming into her from behind. I was pinching one of her nipples, and when she suddenly threw herself back, I thought maybe I’d hurt her.

“Fuck,” she said, staring at me with her eyes wide open. “Mrs. Thompson’s outside. I hope she didn’t see anything.”

I thought that was it, but Robin got down on her knees and sucked my dick for a bit. She was worried, but not that worried.

I can’t remember how many times I came that afternoon. But every time, I was hard again a few minutes later. What I wouldn’t give to be a teenager again. I don’t even think we stopped. It was more like we eventually passed out, covered in sweat with nothing else to give.

When I went back the next day, I didn’t bring my friends. But I did bring my brother's board and gave Robin her first lesson. That made it into chapter one of her book. She left out the fucking from the day before. And the fact that we did it every day after that until her parents got back from Philly.

Things changed a little when they did. I couldn’t exactly show up at her door. Her parents would have killed her. Not just for hanging around with a Mexican, but for skateboarding too. Both were considered lower class.

So we met down at Venice Beach. It was close enough to both of us, but far enough away that Robin didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing us together. She wasn’t ready to come to my neighborhood yet. She’d have to be at least a halfway decent skater before any of the guys there would even consider accepting her.

We also needed some time to work on her wardrobe. I loved the way she looked, but everything she had was too fancy. She’d stick out like a sore thumb in all her designer jeans and silk tops. I got her into Levi’s and the cheap shirts the hippies used to sell down by the pier.

We kept all of this from her parents, obviously. The good thing was that she had a car and could hide everything she needed for her second life in the trunk. The best part was we had to park some place private so that she could change. And when her clothes came off, most of the time mine did too. That backseat saw more action than a Charles Bronson movie.

Robin was a quick learner, and all the sex made me a motivated teacher. We’d spend the mornings working on her balance and making sure she didn’t go flying when she hit a little pebble or something. Taking a break usually meant disappearing under the pier to make out. On a good day, she’d even suck my dick. Sometimes we’d head back to her car and park behind one of the rundown buildings where we could actually fuck. After that, we’d get right back to skating in the afternoon.

Looking back, I wonder how obvious we were to everyone else. In the morning, I looked like a friend teaching her how to skate. After lunch, her hair was all messed up, and we had shit-eating grins on our faces. I’d keep forgetting that it was supposed to be on the downlow and I’d have my hands all over her every chance I got. What we were doing paid off though. Robin was getting a lot better. So much so that she wanted her own board.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” she said one day. “But I think I need my own board. Your brother’s is cool, but it’s his. Ya know?”

“We’ll hit up some yard sales this weekend.”

“I want a new one,” she said. “Something that I can put my own marks and dents on.”

Jeff Ho’s Zephyr shop was the heart of Dogtown’s surf and skate scene. The place was fiercely local, though. Anyone could walk through the door, but that didn’t mean they had to give you the time of day. If whoever was behind the counter decided you didn’t belong, you were fucked. There were no second chances. And no matter how much Robin changed, she still wasn’t a local.

Being a girl complicated things too. They didn’t skate or surf. They were hangers-on, like groupies for surfers. The only exception was Peggy Oki. Everyone respected her. She was a pro on the Zephyr team, the only girl who could call herself one of the Z-Boys. Robin had come a long way in those few weeks, but she was nowhere close to Peggy Oki.

“Listen,” I told her. “I’m gonna take you to a place, but you can’t walk in and start flashing cash.”

“I’m just going to buy a skateboard.”

“Nah. It’s not like that. Most of the guys who go there don’t have money to throw around. They pay a few dollars at a time until they’ve got enough for a board. You’ve got to act like you can’t afford it, or they won’t sell you one.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

She was right. It didn’t, but that’s how things worked at Zephyr. Robin drove us over to the shop on Main and Bay. I coached her about what to say and how to act the whole way there.

“Park here,” I said.

“We’re still a block away.”

“I know, but pull over. Trust me.”

She finally did, although she didn’t understand why.

“If you pull up in a car and you’re not like thirty or something, it’s a dead giveaway. It’s better if we show up on skateboards.”

“All these rules are fucking stupid.”

“Right. But at least we get to skate some more.”

Walking into the shop that day was one of the scariest things I’d ever done. I remember reaching for the door and almost missing the handle because my hand was so sweaty. Skip was working that afternoon. He was an asshole, but at least he was one of the owners. The good thing was that he cared more about surfing than skateboarding. He always needed money too, so I figured he’d be a little less picky about selling her a board.

“What can I do for you?” Skip mumbled. He was clearly stoned. He usually was.

“I want a skateboard,” Robin spoke up before I could stop her. “That yellow one. Right there,” she said, pointing to one of the new-style fibreglass decks on the wall behind the counter.

“Yeah?”

“Skip, uh, I think what she means is—”

“Shut up, kid.” With the look he gave me, I knew not to say anything else. He turned his attention back to Robin. “That one, eh?”

“Yeah. That one. How much?”

“Forty bucks.”

“I’ve got thirty.”

“Then you don’t have a board.”

I started to panic. Skip could see right through her. He knew if she had thirty, she could get forty.

“Thirty-five,” she said.

“Darlin’, this ain’t a negotiation. It’s forty.”

“How many girls come in here to buy a board?”

“None.”

“Then give me one for thirty-five. I’m down at Venice Beach every day. Girls come up to me all the time asking about skating. I’ll send them here.”

“That true?” he asked me.

“Yeah. And she can skate too. I’ve been—”

“Zip it.” He gave me another look, then went back to Robin. “Thirty-five. And if I don’t sell three boards to girls in the next month, junior here gets a black eye.”

“Deal,” Robin said.

I should’ve been worried about my face. Instead, I was thinking about how fucking hot it was watching her get her way with a guy like Skip. A little later, I told her I wasn’t so happy with how quickly she agreed to his terms. She thought he was joking. He wasn't, but getting punched out by a shop owner wasn’t how things were done north of the I-10.

That new board changed everything. Robin was already pretty good, but the board she was using was old, like mine. That meant it had clay wheels. They were as hard as a rock and didn’t absorb anything. A crack on the sidewalk could send you flying. These new boards had softer urethane wheels. They almost acted like little sponges and made skating smooth. You could go a lot faster without having to worry about wiping out. It took her skating to the next level. Not Peggy Oki good, but good enough that I could bring her around the guys.

Manny gave me all kinds of shit when he figured out she was the girl who owned the kidney pool, and I spent a week fucking her instead of bringing everyone over to skate while her parents were gone. He still hasn’t fully forgiven me for that.

They tested Robin with jabs about being a rich white girl slumming it on the wrong side of town, but she never let it get to her. Just like with Skip, she was quick and knew how to push back. Her skating proved she wasn’t a tourist too. She loved it as much as we did. Whether it was on the streets or sneaking into a backyard pool, she was right there, holding her own.

After a while, it just became undeniable. She was one of us. It helped that Skip told everyone that since she’d been coming around, more girls were showing up at the shop. They weren’t stupid. There wasn’t a downside to having more girls around, especially when Manny told them everything Robin and I had been up to.

“You fucking that white girl?” one of the guys asked me like he didn’t believe it.

“Yeah, and guess what? More of them are getting into skating because of her.”

It only took a few weeks before nobody really cared that she was from the north side. I remember the first time someone other than me stood up for her. We were at a house party, and some kid was running his mouth. A guy named Julio who worked at Zephyr put him up against the wall and dared him to say another word. The kid was so terrified he went limp and just looked down at the floor apologizing. Robin might have been the first exception to Dogtown’s locals-only creed.

I think that’s maybe when she realized something we took for granted. At first no one really noticed when she started bringing a camera around. Robin took pictures of everything. Us skating, the empty pools, our boards, Manny giving her the finger every time she pointed the camera at him. It didn’t bother anyone, but we didn’t get what she was doing either. We just thought that was some white girl shit.

There was an afternoon when I asked her about it. “Why do you take so many pictures?”

“Because you guys don’t.”

I pretended to understand what she meant by that.

Robin was ahead of us. We didn’t think about any of it at the time. We were just kids goofing around. But years later, I realized she had early pictures of legends like Tony Alva and Jay Adams along with the pools they skated. She knew it was important before we did. Most of those pools got filled in and paved over when real estate started to explode in the 1980’s. Her pictures are all we have left.

That summer ended like most summers do when you’re seventeen. One day it feels like it’s going to last forever, then suddenly it’s over, and you’re back at school. That was the case for Robin anyway. I dropped out and started working at a seafood restaurant. My brother left to join the army, and Dad needed help with the bills.

We all put in the effort to make time for each other, but it became harder with each passing week. Between school, work and adulthood staring us in the face, we all just kind of drifted. Then Zephyr went under in December. Robin was the one who told me about it.

“I dropped by Zephyr this morning,” she said. “It’s closed.”

“Skip probably got wasted last night. He’ll open it up once he deals with his hangover.”

“It’s not that. There’s a foreclosure sign on the door.”

It took a while to sink in, and no one ever said it out loud, but that just felt like the end for everyone. Other than Manny, I stayed in touch with Robin the longest, but we didn’t really see each other all that often. She went off to college the next year, joining her brother at Temple out in Philadelphia.

I think the last time I saw her, we went for a drive and parked down by Venice Beach. It could have been somewhere else, but that’s where we usually ended up.

“I’ll come home for Thanksgiving,” she said. “Christmas too. Maybe reading week.”

“Three times a year. Sounds great.”

I didn’t mean to be an asshole. I’d felt it coming for a long time. It wasn’t exactly a breakup; it felt like we already had, although we never officially did. It was just the bitter reality that after things fell apart, she had a life to move on to and I’d be serving discount lobster for minimum wage until something marginally better came along.

That was pretty much it for us. She didn’t come back for the holidays. Her family spent them in Pennsylvania instead. By the time she graduated, my dad and I probably moved three or four times into cheaper and cheaper places. She wouldn’t know how to get in touch with me even if she wanted to.

Nobody did anything wrong. What happened was what we always knew would happen. Our lives pulled us back to the places we came from. Which was how almost fifty years passed before I found myself standing in front of her again.

“Where did the time go?” Robin asked.

“I was hoping you knew.”

She laughed and came around the table to hug me. In that moment, we were seventeen again. I was peeking over the lip of her pool, and she was threatening me with a frying pan.

“I wasn’t expecting this at all,” she said. “Fifty years.”

“Manny told me about it.”

“Of course he'd be the one.” She looked down at the pile of books on her table. “Have you read it?”

“Not yet. I’ve been waiting for a signed copy.”

Robin smiled, picked one off the top of the stack, and flipped through it until she found the photo section. There was Manny giving her the finger, and Skip outside Zephyr pointing at a ‘Locals Only’ sign. She had pictures of pools that I hadn't thought about in decades. She kept going, like she knew what she was looking for. She tapped the page when she found it, then held the book up for me.

It was me, at seventeen. Skinny, shirtless, shaggy hair, riding high up the deep end of her parents’ pool on a day that I can’t even remember.

“I snapped it from my bedroom window. It was the first picture I ever took. I don’t know why I never showed you.”

People could argue about Robin's book all they wanted. They could say she was too rich, too white, or lived too far north of the freeway to know what happened back then. They don't know what they're talking about. Robin does.

“So,” she said, “who should I make it out to?”

“Very funny.”

Robin smiled and started writing. When she handed the book back, I looked at the title page.

To Emilio. Thanks for teaching me how to skate.

I left the best parts out of chapter one.