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Snake’s gonna do a handstand…

 This is my memory of skateboarding as a 10 year old growing up in Mt Waverley.

Chalky clay white wheels, skinny trucks and five ply wooden decks that you’d carve out yourself in woodwork class at school. 

Not surprisingly, there are a few decent hills in Mt Waverley. Speed wobbles and a lack of traction would kick-in down Highbury Road and soon you were knocking the scab of a wound that never healed.

There was a kid in our neighborhood called Snake Mason. To this day I don’t know his real name, despite the fact that his younger brother Greg was a good mate of mine at Essex Heights Primary School. Snake was a local legend because he could do a handstand on his skateboard.

I was more your toe-tapping, 360 type.

A hush would descend on the throng of young skaters at the Highbury Road service station (now a Chinese Restaurant) where we’d skate after it shut on Sunday afternoons.

Word was out… ‘Snake’s gonna do a handstand’.

We’d look up the hill through the ciggy haze where Snake and his pimply mates would gather sitting on their boards.

No one actually asked Snake to do a handstand, he sensed it was time.

He’d take one last drag on his Winnie Red, flick it into the gutter with a catherine wheel flurry, take the ends of his little skateboard in each hand, place it on the ground and lean in.

The topography was enough for the board to gain some momentum and Snake effortlessly willed himself into a position where he was perpendicular to the bisector.

It was like the start of great guitar solo, rhythmic and spontaneous. Left hand communicating with right hand, but the guitar/skateboard somehow an extension of the human anatomy.

Like the solo, the pace would quicken. The hastening clack-clack of the footpath was the only reason you knew the skateboard was gaining pace. The only fear in this scene was in the souls of those watching, for Snake had none. The fact that his long Marc Bolan locks were dragging on the concrete was part of the entertainment. It was pure languorous belief.

Just when you sensed those chalky wheels could grip the concrete no longer, he’d slant inwards, take the corner at the last possible moment as though he was rolling out of a giant Margaret River wave, but with enough speed and momentum that his arc would take him half way back up the hill when the show would finish just as it started.

Snake would flip the skateboard back into the crook of his arm, take the pack of Reds out of the sleeve of his too tight golden-breed surf shirt, flick the bottom of the pack and a cigarette would emerge. It would go from pack to mouth without touching a finger.

He’d sit back down on his board and one of his sycophantic mates would light it just in time for Snake to draw back.

And soon, the natural order was restored.