Marcela

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.”