The Fountain Of Truth

You can spend your entire life searching for the Fountain of Youth and still die a thirsty man.

But when that rumbling in your stomach, hungry for folklore and truth that’s as clear and radically cut as an ice sculpture, comes about, you start considering what you’re exactly looking for these days. Sure, from morning to night, in the mildly entertaining disasters of freedom from a slow wake-up call to a hearty slumber, you attempt to make these small discoveries that have nothing with your education or work ethic.

And sometimes, it leaves you looking for a shot glass and the map to the Fountain of Youth.

However, even in your search for the mythical and mystical can lead somewhere that will make your parents proud.

Even Juan Ponce de León, who is associated with the legend of the Fountain of Youth, later became the first governor of Puerto Rico. I mean, he supposedly spent years looking for this incredible structure that would ultimately give him access to eternal life, or for the waters of Bimini to cure his impotence. See, that’s where the lore becomes laughable. But the man ended up as a governor (after conquering the island of Puerto Rico).

Now let’s say that the Fountain of Youth is a secret and not a legend. Let’s say that it actually exists, somewhere in the hills of Southern California. Let’s say that you have to follow some oddball directions to get there. Let’s say it involves a hike. And let’s say I went there last Saturday.

And let’s agree that the Fountain of Youth was drained years decades centuries aeons ago to protect humanity from the rumored fuck-up known as eternal life.

Good.

Then let’s talk.

It all started Friday night, after a long evening of drinking games, when it struck midnight. Saturday was my friend Chase’s birthday, and we began talking about what he wanted to do on his special day.

“I wanna find this burned down mansion with a drained pool in the backyard,” he said paraphrasily. “And I wanna skate it.”

I’m not a skateboarder. However, I love going on grand adventures in search of something. So I was in. As was Rex, who actually is a skateboarder. And I figured it’d be something interesting to take note of. As an unemployed journalist and soon-to-be published poet, I figure this Saturday glory would be something well-worth writing down.

I was also especially intrigued when Chase said that the only map was “here,” pointing to his temple slowly. Apparently, he saw a girl’s online picture of her standing in an empty pool, asked her how to get to there and she gave him directions that involved the phrases “turn left at the shady-looking bus stop” and “go beyond the general store.” It sounded like an adventure through a few different time periods.

The next morning, Jay, also a skateboarder, jumps in on the adventure. The four of us (Chase, Rex, Jay and myself) hang around a mechanic’s shop where Jay’s truck and Rex’s van are dropped off. Chase’s brother Evan picks us up in his minivan turned mobile surfer’s haven and we stop for food, where it seems very ambiguous to what year it is. Jay orders a pistrami sandwich and a soda while I order a grilled cheese with fries. Everything comes in a plain white bag, all wrapped in yellow paper. Jay is just wearing jeans, Evan is just wearing workman pants, Chase is just wearing ripped up shorts and Rex is wearing jeans and a white shirt, while a reggae song from the early ’70s is gleefully coming from the speakers.

It could’ve been any year. It was a bit surreal.

While sitting in the drive-thru, Chase turns to me and says, “I need you to be Craig Stecyk.”

“I don’t know who that is,” I say. So Chase goes on to explain that Stecyk was the photographer, journalist and all-around documentarian of Dogtown. As Chase explains the relevance of Stecyk to Dogtown, he begins to assign everyone in the van personas from the early days of skateboarding. After much debate, Chase becomes Skip Engblom and Evan becomes Jay Adams. Meanwhile, Rex and Jay fight over who would become Tony Alva. Chase explains that Rex has to be Shogo Kubo.

“I want to be Captain Hook,” Rex says.

“Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Captain Hook?” I ask, as I continue to take notes from my seat.

“Yeah, why not?” Rex says with a laugh.

There really was no response for me. I actually know very little about the politics and staples that made up the fallen empire of Dogtown. If Captain Hook was there and not in Neverland, then so be it. I suppose all Jay Adams and Tony Alva would’ve befriended Peter Pan in a vain attempt to stay young. But again, I didn’t know too much about the names that were being thrown around. I recognized them, but their impact wasn’t as powerful on me.

I never saw the documentary Dogtown & Z-Boys and I never saw the whole thing of the movie Lords of Dogtown. I know very little of the skateboarding scene, past or present. So the theology of Jeff Ho and the movement of Zephyr was lost on me, as Chase and Evan talked. I love listening to how things were when skateboarding first started and the idea of young urban pioneers seems like an incredible tale of almost magical storytelling.

But as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with skateboarders and surfers. I used to rent Endless Summer II on VHS on a semi-regular basis. I loved the original, but I was a kid, so the second one, with dialogue and modern themes made much more sense to me. The 1966 documentary was like…my dad’s movie, and the 1994 sequel was mine.

I bring up surfing, just because my interest in surf culture brought about a curiosity in skate culture, though never nearly as prominent. It also was surfing that birthed the skateboarding scene in a sense. And that transition of water to land seemed like an evolution of sorts. Like creatures changing their bodies in order to make good in a new environment while still able to transform the old, surfers became skateboarders, while still being surfers. It was a beautiful evolution, and I suppose it was essentially a matter of Darwin & Z-Boys.

However, for some reason, I never asked my dad to teach me how to surf or my friends how to skateboard. I just liked learning about the culture, treating it as almost some fictional world of literature and cinema. My actual active interests was more in sports at the time, as I rounded out several years in baseball, basketball and soccer. I’d see kids skateboarding and I wouldn’t think much of it, but when my dad would talk about skateboarding being born, I’d treat like he was telling me a ghost story around a campfire. But it’s from a renaissance that he lived through. I mean, my dad’s only three years older than Tony Alva.

So, true to form, we flew on that lonely road out to Trubujo Hills.

Toots & The Maytals plays the entire car ride, while Chase explains the prospects ahead.

“We’re Dogtownin’ it,” he yells back to us with the windows down. “We’re going right to the source.”

We speed by waves of dead grass spanning across hill after hill, and then it was mansion after mansion, and then it was tree after tree, with shade engulfing the street. Soon, we were seeing houses nearly built on other houses, a rustic old world that I didn’t know existed 20 minutes from where I live.

Evan mentions that the pool might be dirty and we’ll have to clean it out with a broom.

“Let’s look for barber shops, see if we can buy one off of them,” says Evan.

“There’s a general store up ahead,” says Chase.

“Keep an eye out for garage sales,” says Rex.

But pretty soon, we take a left at the shady bus stop and pull over to the general store, where Evan buys a broom.

In the makeshift parking lot of dirt, I take some pictures of the general store and of Rex and Jay wandering around.

“I knew you’d be down with being Craig Stecyk,” says to me.

He pauses, and then continues, “Ok, I didn’t know that you’d be down with being Craig Stecyk, but I’m really glad that you are.”

I laugh and we pile back into the car, jet through the shady and dusty underworld of Trubujo Hills, before finding the right streets. Sneaking through the earthy alleyways that snake through the local houses, we finally come to the end of the road.

There’s no mansion.

“Well, she said there’d be a hike, but I didn’t want to tell you,” Chase says to our group. I grab my bag of pens and paper, sling it around my neck and grab the broom. The other four guys carry skateboards, backpacks and a cooler.

And so we hike up the hill.

There’s no sign of anything but wilderness, as we continue up the steep mountain, winding up through the passes. We come to a clearing at the top and look for structures. We see six posts on concrete, but no pool.

Chase points out foot traffic like their animal tracks in the dirt. “That’s a Vans shoe,” he yells, pointing at the dusty trail.

Then, in the distance, a mass of concrete appears like a mirage. Chase runs down the hill cheering, Evan follows and soon, the five of us are standing on a dilapitated wall, staring down at an empty pool, engulfed in graffitti.

The mansion had burned down decades ago, apparently. All that was left of the place was slabs of concrete and tile, while a decaying fountain sat boldly near the front door, or what was once the front door. Now it was just a few nails in the ground. Spraypainted into the ground at the beginning of the garage was “Your mom called and said it was way past your bedtime.”

This was it, the drained Fountain of Youth.

But it wasn’t actually the busted fountain that once sat in the beautiful courtyard of this grand mansion high up on a hill, looking down on the local nothing. It was the empty pool with spraypaint that read “Peace doesn’t always look perfect.”

And if you didn’t look out at the valley of new homes, maybe just keeping your eyes on the pool, it could’ve been any year. None of the graffitti gave away the year. One wall said “Kill your TV” and another had the perfectly manicured lettering of “Foot Tag” with an arrow pointing to a drop-in spot on a makeshift cement ramp.

So the four skateboarders went to [Dog]town while I took pictures. I tried writing poetry, but I had nothing. This was all I wanted. Sitting on the edge of a long abandoned pool in the California hills on a Saturday afternoon, with a view for miles behind me, friends next to me and a cold beer in my hands…I never wanted to go home.

Why would I? I was watching the only example of early skateboarding I’ve ever seen, over three decades after it happed. There was no flashy bullshit, no ego to pander and nothing to prove.

The modern skate culture doesn’t entice me. There’s too much media, too much sponsorship, too much delusion. But there’s no way to avoid it now. It’s what destroyed punk and it’s what changed rock ‘n roll. But every once in a while, you see the dangers of punk and you hear little reminents of the shock that rock ‘n roll once brought, like an apocolypse sold to the highest bidder.

But this…what I saw Saturday, what I did my best to keep fresh in my sunburned mind was truth. It was the matter of true words without some altercation you have in your soul where you start to doubt what you know with your five sense because of all the oulets that have the ability to ravaged your heart, ultimately fixing your gears in a direction you may not think to be right. You feel like you look back over your shoulders, as the media, your teachers, your goddamn elders pull you away from the beating source. One day, you think, I’ll go back to there, but you put it off and fill your time with things you want to do, sure, but you’re not begging the war to stop between your heart and soul. And when those two things inside you agree on something true and you still keep away from what you think is the truth, you’ve got yourself a serious fucking problem.

It’s only a matter of time before you realize that the Fountain of Youth is actually the Fountain of Truth, something uncorrupt to you and those that you know treasure a pull beyond nostalgia. And you can turn it into something more concrete than the empty pool I watched be skated last Saturday. You can turn it into everything that matters to you. You can take your grand adventures, your all-time searches for nothing, your wasteland promises that you always write down when you have something that comes close to the poem you want to spend your whole life writing, and you can turn them into something that will last you into old age.

And deep down, you know what I’m talking about here.