Paranoid Park (3 page)

I drove Jared to the Greyhound station. He kept talking about how laid he was going to get. I didn’t say much. I remember feeling sad when I dropped him off. I remember wishing I had better friends.

That was the thing about my high school. The normal people were boring and the few people that were cool, like Jared, were too crazy. They were fun to hang with, but they could never follow through on anything. You could never count on them.

When I dropped Jared at the bus station he gave me the key to his house, so I could still stay there. The house would be empty, so I still had everything covered. I could call Jennifer or play video games or whatever. I still had the whole night to myself.

I pulled out of the bus station and drove around. For the first time, it felt like fall that night; the air smelled like burnt wood and had that dry foggy taste to it. Other high-school kids were out, driving around; you could feel the excitement in the air of a new school year, new fashions, new music on the radio.

Eventually I got bored of driving. I still had my skateboard in the backseat, and I thought about going to Skate City. But that would suck too much. I thought about checking out Suicide Stairwell but remembered they locked it at night. And they’d fenced off the big parking garage....

Then I pulled a U-turn and drove toward Paranoid Park. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t ready to go there by myself. I wasn’t good enough. But for some reason, that’s what I did.

I circled underneath the Eastside Bridge like Jared had done, but it was so dark and deserted I didn’t want to park. I didn’t want anything to happen to my mom’s car. I drove back over the bridge and parked in the nice part of downtown and then rode my skateboard across.

I found a rusty metal staircase that went down from the bridge. As I walked down, I could see the entire park spread before me. It was crowded on a Saturday night: rad skaters, hot chicks, people partying, goofing around, hanging out. I felt my heart pounding in my chest as I jumped down off the stairs. This wasn’t some high-school beer party. This was a serious scene.

I came up with a plan: I wouldn’t skate at first, I’d sit and watch and not do anything stupid. Maybe I wouldn’t skate at all; maybe I’d just scope things out for when Jared came back.

That’s what I did. I found an empty spot along the big cement wall and sat on my board like I was waiting for someone. It totally worked. Nobody bothered me and it was totally fun. I could have sat there all night, watching the skaters and the girls and all the stuff going on. The only bad thing was, I started thinking about other things. Like my parents. My dad had supposedly moved out, but he kept calling the house and bugging us, and my mom was not handling it well. And my poor brother Henry-he was thirteen, and he would get so worried about stuff he’d throw up his dinner. He was like that. He couldn’t handle stress at all.

I also thought about Jennifer. She’d seemed pretty determined for us to be together. I mean, she was nice and everything but did I really want to go out with her? Also, she was a virgin, which meant she’d want to “do it” at some point and then things would get all serious. I mean, worse things could happen. I just wished I liked her more. I wished we had more in common-

“Hey,” said someone behind me.

I turned around. A creepy guy was sitting on the cement wall above me. He was with another guy and a girl. The two guys stared down at me. The girl lit a cigarette.

“You gonna use that board or you just gonna sit on it all night?”

I shook my head. “Nah, I’m waiting for someone.”

“Mind if I use it? While you’re waiting?”

“I’d rather not.”

“What kind is it?”

I told him. He admitted he didn’t know much about skateboards and asked me about it. I told him what kind of deck it was, what kind of trucks.

He asked to borrow it again. “Just for five minutes. One time around. C’mon. If I don’t come back, you can have the girl,” he said.

The two guys laughed but the girl didn’t. She was younger than them. They had beer and cigarettes and probably other stuff. The two guys were borderline gutter punks. They were dirty and had that hard look about them. Jared called people like that “Streeters.”

I didn’t want to lend him my board, but I didn’t see how I could avoid it. He must have seen this in my face. He hopped down off the wall. “C’mon, bro, five minutes,” he said.

“My friend will be here any minute,” I said.

“Bro,” he said firmly. “Five minutes. And then I give it back. Scout’s honor.”

I gave it to him.

He looked it over and took it to the lip. A girl on the other side was waiting and he waved for her to go first. He made a big show of it. “No, after you, I
insist,”
he told her, waving his hand dramatically. He was kind of a character, I realized. He had a theatrical way about him.

He dropped in. He wasn’t technically a great skater. All he could do was ride. But he had style. He wound his way around the park, almost falling several times. Other people laughed when they saw him. “Hey, Scratch!” someone called out. Other people whooped and yelled. He was like the local clown or something. But also, people were a little scared of him, you could tell.

Meanwhile, his friends introduced themselves. I don’t remember the guy’s name. The girl’s name was Paisley. The guy asked me if I came around there often because they had never seen me before. I said just one other time. I remember I didn’t really want to look at the guy, but I kind of stared at the girl. She was so young-younger than me, maybe fourteen. Scratch and his friend were both older. The whole situation was pretty sketchy.

“Check out Scratch,” said the guy. Scratch had lost his balance and was making a big show of it, waving his arms around, sort of mocking the more serious skaters. He really was like a clown.

After exactly five minutes he came back. He shot up the side of the bowl and caught the board with one hand. He gave it back to me.

“Thanks, friend,” he said.

“No problem,” I said. I noticed he was missing a bottom tooth, right in the front of his mouth.

Until that moment, I’d been planning my getaway. But once I had my board back I felt safe, or at least safe enough to hang out a little longer. I was curious, I guess, about Scratch and his friends.

We talked. I sat on the wall with them. Scratch and the other guy kept up their banter; they wanted to impress me, I guess. The girl never talked. I kept watching her. She had a homemade tattoo on her wrist and black nail polish and this kind of cave-woman shape to her face. I wondered where she came from, what her family was like, if she even had a family.

Scratch talked the most. He asked me questions about skating stuff, treating me like I was an expert, and always saying how much he loved the philosophy of skateboarding and the rebel nature of it. It was a loner sport, he said. It was like being a samurai but with “boards instead of swords.”

I asked him about Paranoid Park, like about the skinhead who got stabbed. He told me the whole story—how the skinhead didn’t really get stabbed, and he wasn’t really a skinhead, and the whole thing had been wildly exaggerated over the years.

It was fun talking to them. I kept meaning to leave, but I had nowhere else to go, and it was kind of a thrill being there, talking to someone like Scratch. He had lived up and down the West Coast and hopped trains and slept in bus stations and stuff. He said he got in a fight with a cop in San Diego last summer, so he couldn’t go there anymore so he was going to crash in Phoenix for the winter and start a band with a friend. It was pretty wild stuff. Especially hopping trains. I always loved trains. I always wanted to hop one.

After a while they ran out of beer. And they needed cigarettes. Scratch said he’d go. Did I have any money?

I figured they would eventually ask for money, so I said I didn‘t, but then when everyone else had a five, I found a five in my jeans pocket and gave it to them. Scratch asked if I had a car, and I was glad I had left it on the other side of the river. I said I didn’t, that I had taken the bus.

Scratch volunteered to walk down the road to a supermarket. It was kind of far, did I want to walk with him?

No. I wanted to hang out. But then the other guy looked at his watch. “Hey the ten-twenty’s going to come,” he said. “You guys can catch it.”

“Hey,” Scratch said to me. “Wanna hop a train?”

I looked up at him. I kinda did. “What sort of train?”

“The ten-twenty. It comes right through here every night. We can ride it all the way to Safeway.”

They talked me into it. Or I agreed. I don’t remember, exactly.

The other guy and the girl offered to watch my board, but I said I would take it with me. Scratch said it would get in the way, but I insisted.

We left Paranoid through the hole in the chain-link fence. I followed Scratch, sliding on my ass down the dirt hill. I watched the back of his stubbly head and hoped I wasn’t doing something stupid. He wouldn’t rob me, would he? Or take my board? But whatever. I sort of didn’t care at that point.

At the bottom of the hill, we dusted ourselves off. That’s when I heard the train horn blare. I could feel the rumble of it under my feet.

“That’s it!” shouted Scratch, and he broke into an excited run. I ran with him, my whole body tingling with anticipation. I couldn’t believe I was doing this.
I was going to hop a train!
Jared would be so jealous. It served him right!

We ran through the old buildings, until we came to the train tracks. The train was really there, it was really coming. The single front headlight shone directly at us.

“Get back,” said Scratch when we reached the gravel track bed. “You can’t let them see you.”

We both ducked behind a loading dock. We crouched there, watching, breathing hard.

The locomotive came even with us. I couldn’t believe how big and powerful it looked.

After it passed, Scratch leaned forward. He studied the different cars, watching them pass. Then he picked one and started to jog alongside it.

“Come on, run!” he shouted over the noise.

I clutched my board and dashed after him in the darkness.