remus

Our skatepark was first generation, to be generous. The main bowl was an immense, lumpy pit of rough concrete with a four foot concrete slab encircling it, seemingly added as an afterthought. Just to get up on that wall involved a violence and momentum that threw you off your board.. After that you had to incrementally train yourself to stay on your board long enough to make the rough transition down. Izzy was the first to do what we called a “roll out.” Basically this involved starting at the top of the snake run and proceeding at speed down the hill and into the bowl, popping out and landing at the top. Sort of a proto-ollie, though Alan Gelfand hadn’t invented those yet. Watching him do a roll out one day, and trying to use some big kid language, I said, “You sonofabitch how’d you do that?” I knew the literal connotations of the phrase son of a bitch but it just popped out of me. There are two kinds of people. Those who think you’re calling their mom a bitch, and those who just using a phrase. I didn’t figure Izzy for the former, but I’d forgotten about that East Side pride thing. Those guys didn’t take shit from people. Izzy was’t from the “mean streets” of Lafayette, he lived in a kind of suburb-y area, to my memory, but still, you can’t have people saying shit about your mom. I’m romanticizing, maybe.

Izzy gave me a pass, kind of. He looked at me, said something like, “…don’t call my mom a bitch,” but with no real force or menace. A mutually acknowledged protection of honor was recognized, and then he took the palm of his hand and hit-shoved me. I didn’t even stumble backwards. A few years later he loaded up his drums and went out to California.”

“[...] We were practicing in a one-room studio and I was standing outside because there was no PA, so I stood outside to listen clearly, in a parking lot, I heard ‘Nightrain,’ and ‘Rocket Queen,’ and ‘My Michelle‘ coming together for the first time in rehearsal, right, and these guys were all okay, they were on top of it. I was like, my eyes were watering and I had chills, and I was like going, “We finally got the songs I’ve been looking for,” and Izzy told me when he gets out of rehearsal, he goes, “Now I see what the fuck you’ve been talking about for the last three years.” It’s hard to convince someone, they don’t know what they had, I’m real good at seeing a person’s potential. Sometimes so much so that it costs me problems because I see the potential in this person and I put so much belief in them, but they don’t have the guts to dig for what I see inside of them, so sometimes that’s been problems. But other times, like with Izzy, I was always pushing him with songs because I knew it was there, and now he’s really glad I did and it worked out good for the both of us. So now we don’t argue so much about material because of the fact that we don’t have, everybody has a good respect for each other, and those guys have a lot more respect for my direction and stuff, so it works out pretty good. We don’t really fight about material. We fight about things like, “Alright, who made all the phone calls and billed it up to my room?” You know, that’s what we fight about. Shit like that happening to each other. “Who came in my room while I was gone and raided my in-room bar?” And that could be any of us who have done that to the other guy and that person gets stuck with the bill.”