Parenting:
NOT IN THE MOVIES
by Joyce
Maynard
Originally broadcast on National Public Radio, 1994
My daughter Audrey's boyfriend, Nate, has had his driver's license for several months now, but his preferred means of transportation is his skateboard. Until I met Nate, I'd never paid much attention to the sport of skateboarding. Now I know how much grace and precision is involved in those moves you see kids pulling off in parking lots and along curbs, and how many hours of practice it takes. I know about waxing the side of a curb and I know the brand of shoes a skateboarder favors, and the way he likes to wear his pants (baggy, and low-slung). I understand now the excitement he's apt to feel when a gas station closes down, leaving that perfect combination of open tar and elevated curb, free for practicing moves, at least until the police also discover the spot, and shut him down.
Nate spends a lot of time at our house, and I'm very fond of him, so I don't even mind it when I come home and find his skateboard leaned against our porch railing. He's one of the most thoughtful and considerate teenagers I've ever met. Last summer, for instance, when Audrey was working as a bus girl and and taking a photography course, Nate used to skateboard over to our house a little before noon and fix Audrey a picnic lunch, which he would deliver to her on his skateboard. I'd look out my office window sometimes, on sunny August days when I was bent over my desk, and watch Nate glide down the street in those size 46 pants of his, with his baseball cap on backwards and Audrey's sandwich under his arm and think, "There's a person who knows how to enjoy life." He himself had tried hard to get a job, actually. But maybe in part because of his wild, skateboarder's hairdo and big baggy pants, none of the places he'd applied had hired him.
We got some exciting news here recently. Columbia Pictures had been looking for a particularly picturesque looking mid-sized New England town to shoot a movie. They chose ours.
Now this is the kind of town where the City Planning Board's decision to deny my application for a curb cut to expand my driveway makes it onto the local cable news. So you can imagine it's a front page story when a major motion picture studio chooses to use Main Street for a movie starring Robin Williams. Especially when they also announce they'll be needing a couple hundred local citizens as extras. Auditions would be held the following Sunday afternoon. There were no speaking parts available. However, they were looking for a good skateboarder.
The
next day Nate stopped by. He didn't seem as excited as I was about the
auditions, but said maybe he'd give it a try. "Maybe!?" I moaned.
Where else was a sixteen year old boy going to pull in a hundred dollars
a day, and get to be in a feature film as part of the bargain?
Over the next couple of weeks, I must have brought the movie auditions up half a dozen times to Nate. I was glad when he said, at last, that he'd be going. Of course Nate wasn't the only skateboarder in town. But thinking of his lanky frame and what a distinctive figure he cut on his skateboard, I couldn't imagine that there could be anyone better suited to the job. And who knew what might happen, once he'd been chosen for this one movie.
The morning of the
auditions I was making breakfast when Nate stopped by, with his skateboard
under his arm. I could tell right away that something was wrong, just
from the look of him.
"My wheel broke," he said. "I can't ride it like this."
"So," I
said, "you'd better fix it."
But the store that sold the kind of bearings he needed was closed on Sundays.
As for borrowing one of his friends' boards, all the other skateboarders
he knew were out of town for the day. Now, I calculated, Nate had an even
better chance at getting the part in the movie than before. If he'd just
get himself a skateboard.
With my urging, Nate located a wheel with usable bearings on one of our Rollerblades, but it wasn't quite the right size. He made a few attempts at riding on the mismatched wheel, then picked up his board and put it back under his arm, looking glum, and left.
"I guess Nate's headed over to the auditions?" I asked Audrey a few minutes later.
"No," she said. "He went home."
"I'm going to have a talk with him," I said. "This is ridiculous."
My daughter grabbed my arm. I yanked myself free. "When is another opportunity like this going to drop in his lap?" I said.
"Leave him alone Mom," Audrey told me.
"Call him back," I said. "We'll find him another board. There's got to be someone who has the right size ball bearing." I was heading for the phone.
"He's crazy," I told her, my voice rising.
"Somebody around here may be crazy," said my daughter gently. "But I don't think it's Nate."
That night after supper I found Nate and Audrey sitting on our front porch eating popsicles. I told Nate I was sorry for overreacting to his decision not to try out for the movie. "I got carried away," I said. "I just thought it would be such a great experience for you."
"Nate never really wanted to be in the movie in the first place," Audrey said. "He doesn't need to be in a movie. He just likes to skateboard."
Which was true for
most of the other skateboarders in our town too, evidently. The reason
they weren't around for the tryouts on Sunday was that they'd all gone
up north for the day. To a skateboarding park.
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